


Heaven Has No Concrete

by kaulayau



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Family Drama, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Infrequent Cartoon Violence, Istanbul is Constantinople, Post-Canon, Sibling Bonding, Time Travel, another Netflix-thing I watched was Miss Hokusai and that was really awesome I recommend, but they’re all out of bubblegum, everyone’s just figuring it out y’all, like a fountain, period-appropriate pop music playing in the background, scooby doo reveals, yeah that, you know that Kill Bill Vol. 1 thing where blood just like spurts everywhere
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2019-11-18 18:56:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18125165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaulayau/pseuds/kaulayau
Summary: “It’s a second chance,” Five tells them, tired. “A second chance. We can do it over again. We can grow up, for real this time, and we — we can make sure we don’t need to be stuck here, waiting for our lives to happen.”They stare at him.“But we will,” Vanya says. Her palms open, then close, then open again, like a half-hearted, quiet suggestion. “Isn’t that how it works?”border border borderThe past is the future is the past is the future is the past. Or something just like that.





	1. Long Enough That It’s Musical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what a binge!

“Does he love us?”

It’s Vanya. Or not Vanya — she would never touch a dress in her life. Yeah, after leaving the Academy, she mailed all her skirts and heels to Klaus — she’d packed them on accident, she claimed — and by some godly ordinance they were around the same waist size, but he really couldn’t squeeze into her shoes by then, which is a shame — and she probably hasn’t looked at all those kinds of things since. Vanya’s all ironed pinstripe suits and tiny smiles like open palms and tightened bows she wouldn’t let Klaus swing around. As of late, Vanya’s hell-bent revenge plots and universal genocide and magical beams of light that make the Earth explode. And a dress.

Besides, Vanya always had color to her. Klaus always had color to him, too. And so did the trees, and the dirt, and — they’re in a fucking park and black and white —

Okay. “We didn’t make the jump, then.” He’s not used to this liminal afterlife space, but at least he’s had the experience. And where’s everyone else? That’s not very fair. They don’t even get a hurrah.

“Klaus,” says Vanya, sounding a tad bit more urgent. Oh. “Did he ever love us?”

“Van-Van, you know that I don’t really know how to talk about that kind of —”

“ _Klaus_.”

Whoa.

He blinks at her. “Okay. Okay. Well.” She looks like it’s been raining for a day. “Oh, he hated us. Little parasites. But, well, it, depends.” That’s what he thinks. ‘Twas quite the drag, their collective childhood. “Do you mean, like, he loved us in his own little way, or he loved us so much his old-man heart gave out, or he loved us so much he’d give his own life to —” hold on. Hold the fucking phone. “We didn’t make the jump.” Klaus swivels around and he almost wants to laugh — but there’s no exit to this park — there’s no little girl that might be Jesus on a bike — Dave. Dave. He’s _somewhere_ , and now that Klaus is _nowhere_ , he can actually — oh, God, it’ll be —

“He loved _you_ ,” Vanya says. Her voice sounds like rocks on pavement. “He loved you, and Luther, and Diego, and Allison, and Five, and Ben. In his own little way. So much his heart gave out. So much he’d kill himself.” She looks at her feet like the whole world’s below her. “He was _scared_ of me. I didn’t even know it. He’d rather me be dead than near all of you. Do you know what that’s like?”

Well. Klaus is here, and so is his sister. What’s there to say but anything in the air? “I’m not scared of you. None of us are.” She looks up at him. It’s like they’ve shrunk. It’s like they’re kids. It’s like he can still fit in her shoes. “And I think I can speak for all of us when I say you’re much better off alive.” He's never been good at condolences.

Is there a uniform in purgatory? He didn’t catch the drift.

* * *

They arrive, sprawled. Allison thinks she’s the first one to realize it.

“Guys,” she says. “Guys, look. I think we’re —”

She stops.

Her fingers rush to her throat like she’s strangling herself, or she’s told herself to.

She screams.

She screams and she screams, as if she isn’t sure she can take it. The sound itself is like nothingness.

Luther’s shaking her. “Allison? Allison?” There’s a thud somewhere. “Can you hear me? _Allison!_ ”

“Luther, you dropped our goddamn sister,” Diego says.

“This is _torture_ ,” says Klaus. “Please. Let me go back.”

“Oh, yeah?” Five starts. “Where’s that, Klaus? Where are we? You’re half your fucking age. What are we going to _do?_ Are we just going to — Allison, we need everyone to focus.”

When she was a kid, she’d have nightmares. Faceless monsters. A house she didn’t recognize. Falling from the sky. Hell, or what she thought it looked like. Her father. Her mother. Poison. A ghost. A rumor. Anything, with a constant.

She’d count on Luther to be there when she woke up again — but this doesn’t count.

Vanya.

 _Vanya_ —

Allison gasps her voice away. Her ears are ringing. It’s not so hard to push Luther off of her.

Vanya’s on the floor, and she hasn’t had bangs like this since they were fifteen.

She isn’t conscious, but she has a pulse, and she’s breathing.

“You gave us a real good scare then. God, _I_ was scared. They said I couldn’t give you blood, though. So that sucked.” Klaus materializes next to her, curled. “I _saw_ her. We were talking. She asked a lot of weird questions, you know…” He hugs his knees to his chest. “I feel so _clean_. Like a sponge.”

Maybe they don’t know what to do.

“Is she going to be okay?”

She hasn’t heard that voice in years.

They all look at him.

He looks at his hands.

So this must be a nightmare. Ben is always in her nightmares.

Chest open, and skin torn. She could see his lungs. She could see his heart. She couldn’t leave in time to save him from himself.

“ _I heard a rumor you were all right_ ,” she’d say. “ _I heard a rumor you were going to live_.” It didn’t work.

It didn’t work when it was real, either.

Rumors never got her anywhere.

Well. They did.

Allison pulls on Ben’s arm — she pulls him onto the checkered-tile floor with her — this is her _brother_ , oh, God, it’s her _brother_ — 

She didn’t feel this same grief until she had to leave her daughter.

She missed Ben so much she thought she’d burst.

So did all their siblings.

She slings her arms over him and clings to him, and when she screams, her voice feeling raw, she screams into his shoulder. She hasn’t really cried in decades. Not without words, at least.

Her brothers join them on the checkered-tile floor, though they are silent.

“Allison,” says Ben, like a whimper. “Luther. Five. Diego.” He sniffles. “I — I see you every day, Klaus.”

They laugh, something sickly.

She wishes this would stay — but Vanya isn’t in this circle. They never brought Vanya into their circles.

“I've never turned down a healthy reunion,” says Five, muffled and nasally, “but maybe… this isn’t the time for sentiment.”

They separate. The distance is almost tangible.

Allison is reminded again of Claire, who probably doesn’t exist.

Claire.

Oh, God. She feels weightless. 

“I’m with Five for this once,” Diego says, stilted. “We need a plan.”

“Right.” Luther brushes himself off and cracks the joints in his wrists. “We need kill her.”

Allison doesn’t think she can believe it.

“How _dare_ you?” She took her voice for granted. “ _How dare you?_ Are you _out of your_ —”

“This is not how plans work —”

“I didn’t calculate the trajectory of this whole — I didn’t calculate at all, and we should have just —”

“Let me go back. I want to go back. Dave —”

“Guys, guys, we can’t start this!”

“Hello.” It’s a lady at the counter. Counter. Booths. Chairs. Tables. Checkered-tile floor. “It’s rather late, isn’t it?” This is where Five would always run off to, until he didn’t. “Can I get you kids anything?”

* * *

“So, the plan —”

“Shut up,” Five tells him. “Eat your doughnut. Let me drink my coffee in one minute of peace.” He needs to fucking wake up before he zeroes in. 

“Choke on it,” Diego mutters. There’s no one else in the diner but the seven of them.

Good to know that time travel hasn’t changed them much. He expected migraines, lower-back pain, symptoms of arthritis and drug withdrawal, bruising, bickering, existentialism. All he got was bickering. _Five’s_ the one getting the migraines. Idiots, the lot of them. Idiots eating doughnuts they don’t know how to pay for.

Vanya’s in the corner of the booth, by the window. Five doesn’t know when she’ll wake up, but he’s counting on it being soon. Luther and Allison are huddled near her, Allison’s arm linked to Vanya’s like a bridge. He’s used to seeing them grown-up, at this point. Diego’s sitting over here, next to Five, slapping a sugar packet out of Klaus’s hands. And Ben, across from him — just the way he looked the morning before…

Of course Five would want to time travel. Why was their father so shocked? Why was it such a surprise that a _kid_ needed a second to grieve? Why didn’t he stop Five from running? 

Why didn’t his brothers and sisters?

At least Vanya shook her head. Maybe not for the reasons he wanted her to, but, well. She did.

God. 

It was the worst thing, in the post-apocalyptic expanse of the future, and through the woven threads of time, when he started forgetting their faces. Their voices left him first, and he’d forget how such and such happened. He found that he couldn’t keep much past their names. He’s not sure why he’d wanted to survive after that.

Well, they caused the end of the world, anyway. In one way or another.

They don’t seem as _bothered_ as he was. But they do have the undeniable advantage of each other. He didn’t have such a luxury.

And now his coffee has been drained.

“Agnes,” he calls, “would you be so kind as to give me a refill?”

The waitress hesitates. “Oh. I’m sorry, sweetie, I’m not used to people reading my name-tag yet.” She comes over with a pitcher. “I’m new here, you see. Came in two days ago.”

“Not a problem.” Five stretches his mouth.

The waitress smiles back uneasily. “Do you want anything else? Orange juice? More donuts?”

“I want to go back,” Klaus says, mumbling.

Diego pries the pepper shaker out of his hands. “He’ll have a croissant.”

“I can call your parents if you’d like.”

“No,” they say in cacophony. “No, thanks. We’re okay. Hard pass. It’s all right. We wouldn’t want to bother you.”

She does not seem entirely disappointed. “Oh — okay.” The waitress comes back with a box. “This one’s on the house.” Croissants. Glazed.

They each take one. Ben swallows his in two seconds.

“All right,” says Five. “Now we can talk plans.”

“I can’t believe you, Luther,” Allison says immediately. “We’re not going to kill her. We can’t. This is _Vanya._  She’d walk out when we watched movies where the dog died. She’d cry for hours every time we’d come home hurt.” She glances at Ben.

“And she killed Pogo,” Luther says. Allison crosses her arms. “She killed billions of innocent people.”

The silverware rattles. “That wasn’t her.”

“She hurt you. You couldn’t speak. Imagine how many other people she’ll hurt if we don’t —”

“Think about it. This is our _sister_.” She rubs a hand over her face. “If it was me —” her voice breaks as if in half — “would you have said the same thing?”

It’s a low blow. This whole exchange is low blows. Five starts drinking his coffee; he burns his fucking tongue.

“I — yes,” Luther’s going. “Yes, I would.”

“You’re lying.”

What now? What changed? Five looks around and takes it in.

“But I know you’d never do something like that.”

“Neither would Vanya.”

The waitress is mopping the floor behind the counter; she still makes coffee the same after a dozen-odd years, it looks like. The bar looks like it’s just been installed. All the chairs and benches are bright shades of yellow and green. They must have tried some sort of theme.

“Guys,” Ben interrupts, “are you… going to eat your croissants?” They stare at him, then shake their heads. Ben makes a beeline. “Thanks.” He absorbs them.

He looks at Five. Five hands his pastry over.

This seems to have calmed them all down for a moment.

But Five is _missing_ something. There’s something off here, and he needs to figure it out. What else might give it away?

There’s wallpaper.  An old jukebox. A poster boasts a local concert — there’s a date, March sixteenth, but no year. Luther ordered chocolate milk, and Five takes the carton — there’s no expiration date.

“Speaking of Klaus,” Klaus coughs, “I need some air.” He slides out of the booth.

“Wait,” Ben says, kicking out of the booth, “be _careful._ ”

“Hold on,” says Diego, scrambling.

Well, now’s better than never to say something. “Wait, where are you going?” Five asks. “Sit down. I thought you wanted a plan.”

Allison stands. “I need some air, too. Klaus, wait up.”

Luther gets up. His knees hit the bottom of the table. “Allison.” That’s all he’s been saying all night.

Five can do little but follow them.

* * *

They’re outside now. It’s very cold. This is no environment for khaki shorts. At least he’s been successfully caffeinated. 

The wind picks up, and they shiver.

“Klaus,” says Diego, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“God,” their brother says, like he’s still thirty-years-old. “I’m feeling the headrush. Forgot how many voices there were. Rest in peace.” He seems to notice the rest of them, clumped around him. “Oh, now it’s a family matter.” Klaus scratches his ear. “I’m sorry. I’m _sorry_ , I don’t speak that language. I don’t know what you want. Why are you here? I don’t get it.”

There’s the diner: Griddy’s Doughnuts, a little fresher than it would be later on. But the letters on the sign are already flickering, and the paint, though fresh, is chipped. They’re where they started. Or, well, at least Five is.

“I’m not talking to you,” says Allison, her back turned.

Luther’s persistent. “You just don’t want to hear the truth.”

“The truth? The truth is — you’re the one who was always excluding her. You’re the one that thought she was a burden. You’re the one who never let her in on any of our jokes, or our games… You too, Diego!”

Diego looks up. “Hey, _fuck_ you. I didn’t say anything!”

“Exactly! _Exactly!_ You _saw_ what Dad was doing to her, what Luther was doing, and you said _nothing_.”

“You’re no fucking angel, either,” says Diego. “You’re the one who kept — hitting her around. You never wanted her near you. You were always too fucking busy, huh? Too fucking preoccupied! You’re as guilty as the rest of us!”

“At least I _tried_ ,” Allison retorts. “At least I wanted to make things better. You don’t believe in second chances. You never did anything. It’s like you never cared about her. You toss her off. You never cared about anything but yourself!”

“Look who’s talking!”

Allison huffs. “Do you agree with him, Diego?” She points at Luther. “Do you?”

“I mean, he’s —”

“Oh. Oh, look who’s _talking_ now!”

“Allison, if you’d just see it the way we do,” Luther says.

“ _None_ of you are innocent —”

Ben steps in front of the three of them. “ _Stop it._ Look at yourselves. We’re not going anywhere with this bullshit. We won’t make up for lost time by wishing it’d all come back.”

There’s outdoor seating — Five never noticed that in the future — and three rusted newspaper stands. Taped to a window is a flyer for cello lessons, and another for babysitting services, six bucks an hour, typed. All twelve of the phone-number tabs have been yanked off. There’s no date here, either.

“I’m sorry,” says Allison. She looks at Diego and Luther, but they say nothing.

Wait.

Newspaper stands.

_Newspaper stands._

There’s his answer.

Why did he try so hard?

Well, this one is empty.

“Klaus,” says Ben, like he’s pleading. But Klaus is sitting on the curb, unmoving. “Five.”

“I — I know,” Five goes, to mollify him. “Just give me a second. Let me —” this one is empty, too. Second drawer? Also empty. Goddammit. Does he have to find a fucking convenience store? “ _Goddammit_.”

“What are you doing?” Luther asks him.

“Well, while you all were fidgeting about,” Five says, “I was trying to find out what’s going here. Something’s not right.”

“Something’s definitely not right,” says Allison. “My daughter isn’t real anymore. Ben’s back, and we welcome him by arguing. And our brothers are forgetting that Vanya’s a part of this family.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Five says. “Promise. We have to...”

Just — the third one. There’s a single newspaper left, crumpled in the very back.

He grabs it. It’s wet. He smoothens it out.

There’s comics. An advertisement for a law firm. Next page: legal name-change announcements. Something about a cat. An interview with a plumber.

First page.

“March twenty-sixth. Year of Our Lord, two thousand and three.” Ben would have died a year ago. Is that it? Is this it? It can’t be.

He looks at the headline.

This isn’t what he’d expected. Not in a million years. Not in fifty.

Things just don’t  _work_ that way. The world is not fragile — it’s pliable. Nothing is ever inevitable, really, but two things can’t happen at once if they weren’t meant to. If it hasn’t been tampered with, it remains. It is a circle. It has radius and diameter and circumference and area. On and on and on, it is still final. It won’t be any different unless someone _makes_ it different. There are systems in place, and ideas.

Who would make this different? What could be gained from this change? A single act can change the world; not _this_ one. This wasn’t what _he_ chose. But he doesn’t know what he chose in the first place; all Five wanted was _back,_ and before. It is an insignificant turn.

Is that what did it?

“What?” says Allison. “What is it?”

Five turns the paper over.

 _World Still Mourns the Beloved Umbrella Academy_ , reads the headline. _A Tragic Anniversary._

“Yeah,” he says. “We’re dead.” 


	2. Ciaconna, in D-Minor

It’s like their father knew she’d get upset over it. Like — playing is the only thing she can do, so he’ll take it away.

Twelve-year-olds can’t phrase Bach. Or at least this one can’t. 

That was just the way she turned out.

She relents.

She lies on her rug and switches on the recording. (Vanya likes it better this way, kind of. She’ll get every downbeat.)

It’s a dance. This violinist plays every note so _crisply,_ like cutting through ice and snow with a match — there’s same sharpness for both forte and piano (Bach never wrote in dynamics). Sometimes, it sounds like a voice in steep, shifting whisper. Sometimes, it reminds her of evening, and moonlight, and rooftops. It might be what time sounds like, she thinks. It’s frantic and steady. Unyielding and soft. The music is structured, yeah, but it seems so _lost_ — as if it had been left and shunned forever. It’s as if the music itself is some sort of person, and it is alone, and huddled on the floor, and awake.

One day. One day, if she finds out everything she’s for, and it’s over, she’ll hear the _Chaconne._ She’ll hear it echo.

Vanya rubs her wrist over her eyes.

That’s ridiculous.

Their father really wants her to learn this song. She can’t say why. Usually, he leaves Vanya to her own devices when it comes to repertoire, but then he gave her the sheet music, and she had put two and two together.

She’s got some parts of this score down all right — maybe not to tempo the way she’d like it, and maybe not entirely in tune — but it’s that first _chord_ that’s out for her. Either she doesn’t push up her second finger for the B-natural, or she can’t get her A-string D in tune with the open-string one. The easiest way to do that part is first position. The easiest way to play the song is not at all.

This is stupid. She can’t just do whatever he wants. And the one thing he needs from her is impossible.

(Maybe it’s her strings. They’re getting kind of old, and the E-string is unraveling.)

She should have told him to take it back.

Would he do that?

Maybe she should have picked up piano.

How would their father feel?

Her prescription’s in her pocket. She swallows a tablet.

Mom says at least one a day, and Vanya hasn’t kept up much. She doesn’t like the taste of it, anyway.

Just — maybe if she tries this song. Maybe if she practices. But…

Her door’s slightly open. Vanya sits up. She’s dizzy. The _Chaconne_ keeps on playing.

“Mom’s right,” says Allison, loud enough for the house to hear. It doesn’t look like she realizes it. (She never does.) “We should let her play with us more.”

“What’s she going to do, then?” Luther asks, leaderly as he’s ever been. “What if she can’t keep up with us? It’s going to happen, and we won’t know what to do.”

It’s Ben’s voice next. “What if she gets hurt?” She appreciates that, kind of. He worries about that kind of thing a lot. “We won’t know what to do then, either.”

And Diego laughs in his bitter kind of way. He’s picked that up recently. Bitter laughter. “Deh — Dad would get real p-pissed at that. Fuck.” (He laughs to cover up his stutter.) “Doesn’t matter. Whatever.”

“You sure?” says Five. Vanya’s certain he’s rolling his eyes. She imagines that one day she’ll have to sew them back into his head. “He doesn’t give a shit.” Vanya’s not about to disagree. “Let’s do it. Call her over.” She knew he’d say something. “Don’t waste time.”

“Right? Can we just play tag?” Klaus suggests. He’s the most impatient out of all of them, probably. “It doesn’t have to be a whole thing. It’s simple.”

“It’s not.” Allison must be pacing. “Not until we solve this.”

Vanya doesn’t know what to feel.

Maybe she’ll just — pretend it never happened. She hasn’t heard a thing. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care.

“She doesn’t have any friends,” Allison goes on. “It’s just us.”

Just — she’ll try the other movements. Forget the _Chaconne._ She’ll try to play those. The _Courante_ ’s okay. So’s the _Gigue_. Vanya has the _Allemande_ down, but everybody knows the _Allemande._

“It’s always ‘just us,’ Allison,” Five says. “It’s not like we go out much.”

“Shouldn’t we just leave her alone?” Luther wants to know. “She’s okay, and we’re okay. What if she doesn’t want to hang around with us?”

Diego backs him up. “Yeah.”

Allison keeps at it. “Vanya’s holed up in her room all day. Don’t you feel bad? Don’t you _pity_ her at all?” She sounds frustrated, as if Klaus has taken her eyeliner again. “I know I do. So it doesn’t matter what we want.”

Vanya thinks she — should try something different. Something that isn’t Bach. Maybe Mozart, and one of his concertos. Yeah. Concerto Number Three could work. And Massenet’s _Meditation_ isn’t nearly as difficult as all the baroque stuff.

“Go invite her, then,” Ben says. “We’ll be here. Right, guys?” There’s no response.

Forget it. Forget it, forget it —

Footsteps.

Forget it.

She stays sitting.

“Vanya,” says Allison, at the door. Then all her confidence disappears. “I…” Vanya waits. The recording’s almost through. “Did you want —” the recurring theme appears with flourish. “I heard —” Allison stops.

And Vanya looks at her. She stands without thinking, and her balance is shaky.

They’ve forgotten how to move.

“It’s fine,” Vanya says. And the piece returns in melody.

* * *

Diego takes the fucking thing. Nothing will happen if they stare.

Five can do him a favor and shut his goddamn mouth.

“Let’s look.” He squints past all the blot and print. “A mission went bad. The building was collapsing.” All right. “Ben…” His brother doesn’t seem used to hearing his name yet. “Ben got into a pinch, and…” He flips the page and shakes out the letters. His siblings are making the whole street seem tight. “Allison goes over to help him.” Five must be shitting around with them. He’s cheap. He cracks a rib, he says he slept wrong. He slices his gut, he says it’s a stomach ache. “Then Luther. Five went down trying to — to get us out. Jumped wrong.” Five grapples for the paper. Diego doesn’t let him have it. “Then Klaus afterwards.” God. “And we’re done.”

“What happened to you?” Luther wants to know.

“I guess I get my ass kicked as much as yours.” Allison elbows him. “That’s what it says.”

Five grabs the newspaper from him. “Give that back.” He scans the articles and flips the paper over. Again. He pauses. “There’s pictures.”

They’re black and white, with a warning, wrapped on top, and take up half the page. It’s a special edition, just for the locals. 

Diego. Burns, second-degree, in forearms, palms, left half of face. Deep charring. Allison. Bleeding at the scalp, hair pulled. Broken jaw. Spine exposed. From the looks of it, dry. Teeth knocked out. Diagonal gash through shoulders. Luther. Partially-opened abdominal cavity. Fractures from falling debris. Right ear missing, most likely postmortem. Wounds, shrapnel. Five. Severed arteries in right arm and leg. Possibly ulnar, femoral. Jagged hole in chest. Inconsistent broken flesh. Ben. Nearly decapitated, head barely connected by sinew. Visible rib cage. Skin still stuck to muscle. Mouth full of blood, possible hemorrhaging. Eyes open. Klaus. Almost unidentifiable. In —

Okay.

Diego tears the page out.

That’s fucking — just. “That’s _enough,_ ” is all Diego can bring himself to say. 

This can’t be fucking legal. Then again, they don’t know what they’re dealing with. 

It’s different when it’s a case. When it’s a stranger.

Allison’s got her hand clamped over her mouth. Luther’s eyes are closed tight. Five grimaces. Ben’s shaking his head. Klaus is muttering at the sidewalk.

That’s fucked up, isn’t it? They were kids. They had to see this kind of thing every fucking day. They _did_ this people. So what if those people were thieves and killers. What about the collateral damage? What about Allison? Luther? Five? Klaus? What about _Ben?_ They’ll never get normal lives. He doesn’t even know what’s part of that. Eleven-fucking-years-old and the six of them already tearing limbs while the world cheered them on. Diego’s accepted by now that it’s still murder even when the victims are criminals. Eudora — Eudora would say that. God. Took him long enough to get it.

But it’s something they’ve done. It’s something they _had_ to do. Something _Diego_ has to do. No one ever wants to act. If they don’t, then who will? Who’s capable?

Diego was the second one to leave. Five doesn’t count in that list.

His siblings shouldn’t have to look at shit like this. Doesn’t matter what kind of stupid assholes they are.

He tries to tell them something else, but he can’t.

“That’s not us,” Allison says. “That _can’t_ be us. It’s fake. It’s not real.”

Klaus coughs into the sleeve of his suit.

“Did — did we save anyone?” Luther asks.

Five scans. He’s blank. “Maybe not this time around.”

Diego starts crumpling the pictures up.

But there’s another in the corner, just as painful and mutilated. God. Please. He doesn’t want to —

Oh, shit.

They forgot her.

They left her like they weren’t supposed to.

“I,” he says. Goddammit. _Goddammit_. “We — our _sister_.”

Diego runs into the diner.

Everyone catches up with him soon enough.

* * *

What’s Diego expecting?

A crash.

A fucking explosion.

But Vanya would knit him mittens and gloves he could throw knives in. She got the six of them character band-aids because she knew they liked them better. He remembers that. He doesn’t usually remember that.

The same person tried to save them. At least that’s what the paper said. At least in this fucking timeline bullshit.

The same person published their secrets.

And — the same person destroyed everything he knew.

He doesn’t know how it works.

He doesn’t know if he agrees with Luther or not.

Fuck.

“She’s up,” says Five. “She’s —”

Sitting in the booth. Looking out the window. Drinking Luther’s chocolate milk through a straw.

They’re acting as if there’s an enemy in the room. But…

“We’re _dumbasses_ ,” says Ben.

There’s no denying that.

Vanya rises. She approaches them slowly. Allison moves towards her, but Luther holds her back.

Diego pushes his siblings behind him. “V-Vanya.” He’s not going to sit around and do nothing this time around.

Their sister collapses. Like a reflex, they hurry to catch her.

* * *

“We don’t know even know if _he’s_ alive.” Five’s the one talking. God. Ben thinks it’s kind of a rush remembering that he’s really, truly part of this conversation. He can contribute. He can dispute if he wants to. On a normal day, it’s all one-sided. “Because _someone_ got rid of our only newspaper.”

Diego scoffs. “It’s like you _want_ that shit to eat your brain. You’ll find other fucking newspapers.”

“We don’t _know_ that. We don’t anything much about where we’re at.”

“Fuck off,” says Diego. “Maybe _you_ don’t.”

“Which is why we’re going back where we should,” Luther reasons.

“We shouldn’t be anywhere,” Allison says. “Ben, come on. Stay next to me.”

The whole thing took a while easing into. He should have expected less. He’d hear someone calling, but no one would be talking to him. Someone would be looking at him, and they’d see nothing.

He was dead, but it didn’t feel that way. He was still there, wasn’t he?

He was still there.

“If you all want to find somewhere else to stay,” says Luther, “be my guest. But we have nowhere else to go. Let’s just shut up. You might wake Vanya up.”

Diego pops his knuckles. “You probably will, if you keep tossing her around like that.”

“She’s out cold,” says Five. “You did tip the waitress, right?”

“I had a ten in my sock,” Klaus lets him know.

“God. You disgust me.”

He’d see his siblings. He’d see them arguing or shoving each other around and the only thing he could do is make sure Klaus wasn’t falling over. He couldn’t even cheer.

Why couldn’t he have just gone to hell or something?

“We’ve got each other,” Ben offers. “We can go anywhere, and we’ll be okay.” He’s used to watching Klaus sleep in alleyways and garbage disposals. They got through all the roofie bullshit. Ben made sure they did.

But Luther just looks at him, and keeps walking. “I’m sorry, Ben.” He says it like it’s trapped in his throat.

Ben’s kind of _glad_ that he got stuck with Klaus, though. It does make the most sense. And Klaus needs a guardian angel most of the time.

“Those kids,” Allison says, “weren’t us. Those kids in the pictures. They — they didn’t know what we know. They were just _children_. We’re not.”

All his brothers and sisters need guardian angels.

“We’re no different from them,” says Five. “We got everything they did. The only thing is… they made a mistake.”

“Yeah,” Klaus says, “and we’ve never made mistakes in our lives. Hey. I’m trying to speak to my brother. I don’t why I’m here, either. Please stop.”

Five ignores him. “I know that things are weird, it’s just — it doesn’t make sense. There’s no alternate realities. There’s just _reality_ , and that’s it.”

“And I guess things don’t go the way you want, Five,” says Allison, looking up at the sky.

“We can figure it out as we go along,” says Ben. He catches up with them. “We’ll fix up all this shit. Like we always do.”

Five puts his hands in his pockets. “See where that left us.”

Luther slows his pace. He adjusts his hold on Vanya, as if to make her more comfortable. “Which way do we…”

“Take a right,” says Allison quietly.

“It’s left,” Five corrects her. She sighs.

“I think it _is_ right,” Klaus says.

Ben isn’t cut out to be a guardian angel. It’s not in his job description. 

When Allison hugged him — when everyone hugged him — that was the first time someone touched him in almost… well, forever That was the first time he felt something other than empty air.

Yeah. God. Cool. Nice.

So he guesses there might not be an afterlife, like what all the books say. There might not be a perfect paradise, and there might not be a burning pit. He’s never been to either, so he can’t be sure. Though Klaus always tells him otherwise, and Allison shares that sentiment with him. So does Luther. Vanya says it’s all on Earth — she likes the song. Diego’s never touched on it, and Five’s too pragmatic for an opinion.

He’s the only one who never really got to leave the Academy. He’s the only one who didn’t make that choice for himself. He never really got to choose anything, and Ben realizes now that he never had a problem with that.

It doesn’t feel right that he’s here.

His siblings have found their pegs to fit in, at least for a bit. Allison and her new family. Vanya and her music. Luther on the moon. Diego fighting crime. Five making paradoxes. Klaus making trouble. The only thing Ben does is hear about it, and it gets old if he doesn’t get to _see_ it.

He’s been gone for too long.

And he’s freezing. It’s nighttime, and he’s _freezing_. It’s present.

Klaus grabs his sleeve. “You’re walking into the road. Allison told me. But swear to God, I saw it first.” Allison hits him. 

“Don’t fuck around,” says Five. “We’re almost there. I think.”

“Everything takes longer when your legs are shorter,” Luther says, muttering.

Diego looks amused. “Your attention span’s shorter, too, you know.”

But maybe _this_ feels right. At least he’s here.

* * *

Five rings the doorbell for them. They wait. “Ring it again,” Luther tells him. Diego takes his turn and jams his finger.

Vanya shifts, like she’s stuck in a dream. Luther wonders what she’s seeing.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to fix this, but he knows that he has to. That’s his job. To make things right again.

Allison _could_ have a point. He thinks she always has a point. There’s more than one way to do things.

But what else can he do? 

Vanya trusts him, though. She trusts all of them. Or so he thinks. He doesn’t want to break that.

But Luther realizes that it’s already been broken.

There is nothing to recover. Not unless he does something about it. 

Vanya dismantled the Earth and everything on it.

Everything Luther loves about the world was gone because of her.

And yet... 

No. He can’t brush it aside. If Luther brushes it aside, then everything is gone. If there’s an action to be made, then he must make it.

This was how he was raised. And this is how he will live.

He hears someone coming towards them on the other side of the wall. There is a minute of silence.

Their father answers the door.

“Children,” he says suddenly. There is a mixture of emotion on his face, and it’s almost like surprise. Luther has never seen surprise on their father’s face. He’s never been stunned at a thing. That’s who he is. “Why have you returned to the Academy at this hour?” Luther remembers those photos. He makes an attempt to forget them. “This is unacceptable.” And it’s as if nothing has changed.

First things first, then.

They enter the Academy. It is a familiar thing.


	3. One-time Fruit Bat

It’s late.

He has decided.

Luther kills the lamplight.

“We can do it now. Vanya’s still out. We can… finish it.” God.

He just won’t try to look at her.

Things have changed. There was a time — a recent time — when Luther didn’t want to kill anyone at all. But those people were innocent.

“Yeah,” says Diego, “let’s fucking not.”

And he considers that it’s not the most noble approach.

Shit.

They were sent to bed without dinner immediately after entering. They didn’t get interrogated. They didn’t get scolded. It’s bizarre. In the almost three decades he has lived in this house, Luther has never missed a meal. No one would let him, after all.

Diego sits on the carpet next to him. Luther drapes a blanket over their heads, in a fort.

“Allison’s going to be pissed,” he says. He covers his face. He doesn’t like being this tiny. It’s like being paralyzed, or bound, or suffocated.

Luther must have gotten used to the Simian part of him. He never thought that would be a preference.

He pushes the blanket fort off.

“Not just Allison. Five’ll never speak to us again, and it’s hard enough as is. I know Ben will cry. Klaus, too. And then we’d all try to kill you. And then you’d fucking kill yourself from the shame. That’s how it’ll happen.” He ducks over. “Luther, what about our sister?”

“Allison?”

“ _Vanya_.” Diego takes a breath. “Remember when we were thirteen, maybe, and we slept out in the roof? The seven of us? She’s the one that put all the cots out. She got you fucking, I don’t know, chocolate strawberries. I don’t know.”

He kind of remembers that. He remembers how she pointed out all the stars to him, from a book that Ben must have gave her. He doesn’t remember what they’re called anymore. “That was her?” But maybe that wasn’t the way it happened.

“That was her.”

_Shit._

Diego’s right that Ben and Klaus would cry, if they did this. If Luther did this. He’s right that Five would give them the lifetime cold shoulder. He has a soft spot for their sister, so that amounts to something. And once the dust settled, the rest of them _would_ go after Luther. They might.

He doesn’t know what happen afterwards.

“You don’t know how it will happen.” Luther lowers his voice, just in case. “You can’t see the future.”

“Well, I just fucking did,” Diego says, shoving every syllable. So much for just in case.

“But you _agree_ with me.” Didn’t he say so in the diner? “Billions of people, Diego. They’ll live.” Won’t they?

“They’ll live if Vanya doesn’t? We’ve never… _met_ those people.”

That’s not good enough. “Did you meet any of the people _you_ saved, all on your own?” And Diego doesn’t reply. “Nothing’s ever going to be neat and tidy with us.” He's learned that, at least. “But I want you all to be safe. I want you to live without worrying if you’re not going to see tomorrow. I want that for everyone.” It’s what he knows. “I _don’t_ want to do it. I really wish I could make that decision.” He wishes everything was different, or the same as it was before.

He _would_ give his life. Gladly. If it meant that human life could go on as it did.

“Then let’s not have this conversation,” Diego says. “I’m going to my room. I don’t know why I ever want to talk to you. You want a fucking fistfight? Is that what you need? It’s always going to end that way.” But he still doesn’t leave.

“It’s something we _have_ to,” Luther says.

“You — you didn’t tell her straight. If it actually _was_ Allison, would we still be talking?”

She wouldn’t end the world. “We would.” It would never come to that. But he knows what he’d have I do. “I’d protect her family, afterwards. I’d protect her daughter.”

“What if it was me?”

But Diego wouldn’t do that, either. “You’d… be dead, then.” It’s a fact. “The people you’d lost would _be_ here if it weren’t for Vanya.” They’ve all had to let go of someone at the end of the world. “And everyone you love would be safe. I’d make sure of it.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. “I swear on our father’s life.”

Diego stares at him, unmoving. “If it was Dad?”

He’s put Luther on the spot.

That one isn’t fair.

That one’s not the same. Even if their father is the worst that had ever lived. Is living.

Still.

“I would.”

Because he’d have to, wouldn’t he?

“Okay.”

Diego’s voice is strained when he says it.

And Luther doesn’t think he can do it alone.

He’s tried that before. He’s tried that for four years in orbit. Isolation doesn’t fit right with him.

He’ll have no other choice, regardless.

He thinks of his family, and of the families all over the world. He thinks of the moon, and of the stars. He thinks of Vanya.

And Luther folds his hands.

He feels so  _small_.

Diego gets up. “We’ll need a plan.”

* * *

Normally, if Ben were here, he’d spit some gospel and gripe around and clench his fist in dramaturgy. These ghosts just scream for God and mercy.

There are seven of them. Ghosts. Or ghouls — wraiths, poltergeists, liches — Ben was the type to identify them them all. And this Ben’s just kind of hanging from a thread and half-ripped clothing. This Ben’s head keeps drooping off and away and he keeps having to catch it in his little ghost hands, like something from the trees out behind the Academy.

It’s the nose. If it wasn’t for the nose, and the navy-blue Boy-Scout uniform, and their mangled photographs in the one-time-only newspaper from the diner, Klaus wouldn’t be able to tell it was him.

No joke — Klaus was _really_ confused about it. He’s glad the newspaper pictures had labels.

So if this ghost is Ben — dead Ben, un-resurrected Ben — then this one is Diego. He’s charred up, like meat left long on the grill, but it’s him. This one’s all lanky and blonde and foaming from the mouth — Luther, quite. Curly hair — Klaus used to braid it, and he probably would, if the ghost was solid and still intact — Allison. Five — the one on his toes. Tiniest one — Vanya. By God, it’s Vanya Hargreeves.

And _this_ one is Klaus. The _dumbest_ one is Klaus, and he knows it. He’d recognize himself like the back of his hand. Even with all those open wounds.

They moan in unison, rather unintelligibly. Klaus doesn’t know what these ghosts are getting so excited about. He can’t pick out any words. But these are his siblings’ voices. They have no mouths, so they must scream. They’re hungry and restless. They’re —

Fuck.

Please shut up. Shut the _fuck_ up, _fucking_ ghosts. They’re not very good replacements. They’re not very entertaining at _all._

God. He doesn’t remember what it was like being a kid.

He probably didn’t have the hideously mangled corpses of his brothers and sisters and his own person lugging around behind him.

But still.

The prettiest ghost Klaus had ever met used to be from Saigon — or, actually, California, more specifically, more accurately, near the big red bridge. He’d brought a couple pictures of it, with his sisters in each one. He’d talk about them — his sisters, four of them, younger than him — and Christmas. He’d pretend he couldn’t sing. He’d pretend he couldn’t dance, either. He’d talk about atheists in foxholes and clocks without watchmakers and the right to mount the rostrum. He’d talk and try to make Klaus understand. He’d say he’d want to go somewhere — a summer palace in China or stepping stones in Mexico or coastlines off Hawaii — and he said he’d take Klaus with him. He had a way of making all the new Embassy ship-ins laugh. He was taller, with freckles across his nose, and the brightest goddamn eyes the world has ever been graced to hold. They were staring up at him. They were staring up at him when all the artillery shells started going off —

They were so close to together.

No. _No,_ no, no — he _won’t_ go back _—_ it’s as if he’s pulling hammer and nail across his skin — it’s as if he’s only put together with blood vessels — just like the ghosts, shrieking like grief —

Well. Fuck.

He scratches his head. That might pick it all out.

Okay. This is Five’s bedroom, right? The doors look the same when it’s dark.

When he enters, there’s a rustle. A startle. A book falls over, and a chair. A flashlight clatters on the ground and bounces twice.

“ _Shit_ ,” says Five. He’s on the floor, and it appears that he hadn’t been that way the whole time.

Klaus creeps up towards him and crouches down. He thinks of spiders. The ants and centipedes he’d collect until Ben or Vanya would hit the jar out of his hands. Sometimes both. “It’s the bogeyman.”

He helps the little bastard to his feet. But he guesses that the both of them are little bastards now.

“Close the door.” Klaus doesn’t. It’s a skip past midnight — maybe two hours. Three hours. He didn’t count, and the only watch he owns has a broken face. No — he’s got another one from a kids’ meal, with cartoon cats on it, and another he took from dear-old Dad’s office back in the day. He doesn’t know where that one went. “What do you want?”

The ghosts groan and grope at him. It’s a good thing they’re see-through. “Major fucking headache.” Klaus yawns into his hand. “I require your services.”

“Must be the jump,” Five assumes, tilting the chair upright. “You want me to… raid the liquor cabinet, or what?”

“Yeah.” It feels like routine — might have been, in that case. “I could go for something grand.” Klaus picks up Five’s flashlight and flicks the switch. It shines through the ghosts and onto the ceiling. “Pinot blanc, you think?”

Five squints and throws his hands in front of his face. The shadows cast on the wall. “You’re a fucking adolescent at this point in time, you know that?”

It sounds like he hasn’t done the math yet. Neither has Klaus. “Oh. You’re absolutely right. It’s about time I become a man.”

“Suck a dick, Klaus,” Five says. Not even a full twenty-four hours back home and he’s already grumpy. This place really must be cursed.

“I can see the lawsuits now.”

They have a staring contest. He almost hears it, through all the undead banshee cries — _who stole Allison’s eyeliner? Luther found Klaus sleeping under the table again. Klaus bit himself, and he’s saying Diego fucking did it!_

“Fine,” says Five. “I need a break.” Klaus points the flashlight to the wall. His brother squints. There’s numbers and graphs and — is that a trig function? He didn’t do well in that unit. He copied off all of Vanya’s worksheets. “Don’t go down into the living room unless I tell you to.” He zaps away. And he’s back. “Put some PJ’s on. You’ve been in that all night. It’s filthy. You’ll catch a cold.” And gone again.

* * *

The ghosts follow him down the stairs. None of them ever stick around for this long, unless they’re Ben. Klaus has never had this many fucking friends at once. God, he’s never once consider _himself_ a friend. He’s probably known himself long enough. He’s seen the suspicious drool and the suspicious blood. He’s lashed out. He showers. He eats. He drinks. He sleeps. He wakes up every morning. He speaks. He listens. He listens to himself _even when he’s not talking_. Even when he isn’t up. It drives him _insane._ It’s a goddamn riot. He's well past friendship at this point.

“What — what the the fuck did I tell you?” Five hisses. He’s standing at the kitchen counter. The liquor cabinet has been unlocked, scurried, and infiltrated. “Where the _fuck_ are your pajamas?” He’s more upset at that than anything.

Klaus rolls his shoulder. The seams on his coat look patched. “Thirst waits for no man.” Neither do the dead come alive.

Those ghosts are jealous of him, and of the real Luther and of the real Diego and of the real Allison and of the real Five and of the real Ben and of the real Vanya. That’s why they’re so loud, probably. How come the real Ben didn’t show up all dilapidated? Even the real Ben himself isn’t sure. Everyone else gets their spotlight.

And for a second, Five wears the exhaustion of a seventy-year-old man. And maybe there’s some concern mixed in there. Who doesn’t look at Klaus without concern, though? It comes with the box. It’s nothing terribly new. There’s nothing to try. He’ll just — erase it all, and he’ll keep on erasing until it’s all finally smudged and missing and done. Until it stops leaving skids all over the fucking paper. Until there’s nothing left to grapple for.

Five pours two glasses. The whiskey is gold.

* * *

The whiskey has been consumed.

“They… didn’t talk about it at the Commission, anyway,” says Five. “I’m not sure if they’re _aware_ of it, even. So I’m trying to sort it out. I want to see if there’s more timelines out there. If we’re dead anywhere else. If we tried making jumps in some divergent universe we don’t know about yet.”

Look at all these fucking cubes.

Klaus is the exact same way.

Did he ever need glasses?

That’s not a given.

Chop-chop.

_Anh ấy yêu hắn._

It went like that.

Non-phonetic. 

Phonetic.

He doesn’t have his license yet.

Dust of life.

Band-aids.

Cache.

Doesn’t stop.

Long articles.

“Five,” he says, “what — remind me.”

And Five exhales.

“One shot isn’t drunk, Klaus,” Five tells him. “Actually.”

Klaus is _drunk_ , all right.

“Yes?”

“How much do you weigh again? Ninety pounds? Ninety-five?”

Bottoms up.

“Five.” Klaus was Four until he was four. “ _Tell_ me. What’s —”

Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Six, Seven.

It was a nice change.

No syllable difference.

“What.”

“What’s the name Mom gave you?” It’s viable information. “She gave you one. I remember this.”

Very clearly.

His brother’s all red in the face now. “No, you don’t.”

Klaus wonders why. “Yeah, I do. And she did.”

“I never got one.”

“Fucking.”

Another swig. Another pour.

Ice and more and less.

Counting on his fingers.

A garden? A lake? A bridge?

A pyramid.

Something in Latin.

Maybe Greek.

Maybe French.

Klaus did it. But really.

He agrees with that.

The court reads the statement back to him.

“Charlie,” says Five.

What?

Oh.

 _No._ “ _Fucking_.”

“Vanya’s the only other one who knows.” Shame, shame, shame. But typical. “You’re not going to remember it, anyway. Trust me —”

“I do.”

Cheap Charlie.

The Viet Cong.

Snow.

Blow.

Candy.

C-and-C.

If the six of them died, would they want to stick around?

Maybe not the way it was.

“What are you looking at?”

Klaus cuffs his brother’s head.

His hair goes in ruffles.

For once, Five doesn’t complain.

* * *

INT. HIGH-SECURITY PRISON. MORNING. (DREAM SEQUENCE)

THE HARGREEVES at battle.

ALLISON HARGREEVES, aged 13 and-one-half, with knee-length socks falling down her calves and a dark-blue blazer slipping off her wiry frame, IN COMBAT against ARMED GANG MEMBERS. The LEADER of the gang watches behind bars. PRISONERS in their cells CHEER vehemently. The WARDENS lie unconscious on the concrete floor.

Allison dodges the blade of a knife.

She ducks — kicks — her OPPONENT grabs her arm, reaching for THE KEY TO THE GANG LEADER’S CELL, held in Allison’s hand — he TAKES BY THE HAIR and HOLDS HIS KNIFE AGAINST HER, his wrist in front of her mouth sloppily — she strains — she BITES his hand, and he drops the knife — another GANG MEMBER approaches from behind.

ALLISON

I heard a rumor that _you broke his kneecaps._

The gang members TACKLE EACH OTHER.

Suddenly, the prisoners BREAK OUT. They join in on the festivities — they PUNCH and CRACK. Allison parries and swivels. KLAUS is overwhelmed by the bodies — next to him, DIEGO throws a dagger — Allison GRABS THEIR ARMS and PULLS THEM with all her strength to a CLEARING, a large pile of dead gang members —

DIEGO

 _Allison_. You could have gotten stabbed!

 

KLAUS

Don’t worry about me. I had it covered.

FIVE, unkempt, MATERIALIZES beside them.

 FIVE

Where are the keys? Let’s freaking go.

Allison SIDESTEPS an oncoming assailant. She checks her fists. She checks her pockets. They’re empty.

ALLISON

Shit.

 

FIVE

(livid)

You _fucking —_

Suddenly, he TELEPORTS behind her, above TWO APPROACHING ASSAILANTS — he’s TAKEN OFF HIS TIE — he’s a BLINDING FLASH AND CRACKLE — the assailants CRUMPLE. Five’s tie has been CHOKED TIGHT AROUND THEIR NECKS. It happens in one second.

FIVE (CONT’D)

— _lost_ the keys?

 

ALLISON

I had them one goddamn second ago! I dropped them, that’s all! 

 

KLAUS

I thought _I_ had them!

 

ALLISON

You _didn’t._

OFF-SCREEN, LUTHER breaks a gang member’s neck. We MOVE IN on him, tall and standing.

LUTHER

It’s getting out of hand. We need to leave.

 

FIVE

Allison lost the fucking keys!

 

ALLISON

 _Hey_ —

 

KLAUS

Heads up, kids!

Hundreds of prisoners and gang members, distinguishable only by their clothing, have surrounded the Hargreeves.

The Hargreeves fight BACK TO BACK, endlessly.

Five TELEPORTS in cycles.

Klaus, with help, has PROCURED ALL OF THE GUNS. 

Luther SHATTERS MEN.

Diego THROWS KNIVES.

Allison SPREADS HER RUMORS.

This doesn’t stop them from arguing.

LUTHER

This is unnecessary! I have the failsafe. We can just throw it in, and —

 

DIEGO

We _can’t_ go home empty-handed! How we going to prove to Dad we didn’t fuck everything up and just toss in a fucking —

 

FIVE

Why’d you lose the keys, Allison!

 

ALLISON

_I was saving their asses._

 

LUTHER

Don’t gang up on her.

 

FIVE

You fuck all our missions everything up. You fuck everything up, and all you do is _talk!_ I’m _tired_ of cleaning up after you!

 

ALLISON

 _No one_ here said _you_ needed to do _anything_.

 

FIVE

No one said you had to _fail_ everything!

 

ALLISON

I’d leave if I could!

 

FIVE

Well, I’ll beat you to it!

 

ALLISON

I _hope_ you do!

 

DIEGO

I don’t want to do this anymore.

 

KLAUS

Shut up. You’re the _worst_ brother. You’re just hanging around, popping in at the worst fucking times, and I’m doing all the work!

 

LUTHER

 _Everyone_ —

 Luther is HIT BY A FLYING OBJECT. He FALLS.

DIEGO

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

 

KLAUS

God _damn_.

 

FIVE

Okay, fine, we’re going!

 He GRABS KLAUS BY THE COLLAR and DISAPPEARS IN A FLASH.

 Allison GETS ON HER STOMACH and CRAWLS TOWARD LUTHER. She shouts his name. She checks his pulse. He’s out cold, but he’ll be fine once they escape.

She takes from him the FAILSAFE: a tiny, HOMEMADE GRENADE, with enough strength to demolish skyscrapers.

Five reappears. Allison POINTS AT LUTHER.

ALLISON

(angered)

Aren’t you going to get _him?_ He’s _hurt!_

 

FIVE

Aren’t you going to get the _keys,_ you _useless_ — 

He leaves with Diego. He comes back.

FIVE (CONT’D)

Just — sorry. _Sorry_. I’m fucking sorry!

 

ALLISON

 _Go!_ There isn’t time!

Five takes Luther.

Allison finds a knife. She MANEUVERS.

She PULLS THE CLIP of the homemade grenade and THROWS IT FAR behind her.

She NOTICES SOMETHING. We MOVE IN to a prisoner, arms held high. She is holding a DISTINCTIVE KEY.

Allison gets thinking. She needs to move fast.

So she RUNS.

She runs as if in despair.

OFF-SCREEN, a blast reverberates throughout the prison. The flames seep IN-FRAME, and almost ENGULF THE SCENE.

Allison KEEPS RUNNING.

At the last second, Five GRABS ALLISON DESPERATELY, both his arms around her.

Time seems to stop.

ALLISON

It’s okay.

They FLEE the explosion.

 

INT. THE CELLAR OF THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY. TIME INDEFINITE.

Allison, aged 29, stands in nothingness.

She turns. We MOVE IN on a STILL FIGURE of Luther, in a space suit, ON THE MOON.

Next is Five, IN THE APOCALYPSE, a look of despair on his face.

Diego, AT A PUNCHING BAG.

Klaus, HIGH ON ECSTACY.

Ben, NEARLY GONE.

VANYA. IMPRISONED. She HITS HER HANDS IN THE GLASS of the door to her confinement. Her movements are in SLOW-MOTION.

Allison hurries towards her.

VANYA

(inaudibly)

_Help! Help me, please!_

 

ALLISON

 _I’m coming_ —

She STOPS in her tracks. Her hands are COVERED IN BLOOD. Allison’s neck has BURST OPEN, SPOUTING BLOOD like a rose-red river.

She FALLS.

EXT. THE OUTDOOR PROPERTY OF THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY. DAY.

Overcast skies.

Allison, aged 12, TRIPS.

The ground is dewy and fresh.

Luther, IN-FRAME, in the foreground, sees her, and OFFERS HER his hand. Allison TAKES IT, GETS UP, and BRUSHES OFF HER BLACK DRESS.

GRACE beckons her over, and POGO waits for her.

She takes her place with the others quietly. They are all wearing black.

There is a STATUE ON ITS SIDE, and an EMPTY PEDESTAL.

LUTHER

(solemnly)

I’ve got it.

He HOISTS THE STATUE UP unaided. The statue BEARS THE RESEMBLANCE OF BEN.

Klaus whistles. 

Diego GLARES at him.

DIEGO

D-d-on’t.

 He’s HICCUPING from sobs. 

KLAUS

Yeah. Doesn’t look like him.

 

FIVE

(crying)

Shut _up_. You’re making Diego upset.

Five WIPES HIS TEARS AWAY violently.

Vanya HUGS HIM. Five lets her, jaw clenched.

Diego and Luther WATCH THEM. Vanya PULLS THEM INTO THE EMBRACE.

She BRINGS IN KLAUS, too.

Allison STANDS AT THE FOOT OF THE STATUE.

ALLISON

Ben, when we die, do you think he’ll make all of us statues?

She pauses.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

Do you think he’d be at our funerals? Would he bring flowers?

She looks at the face that is not quite her brother’s.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

If I died, Ben, what would you do?

The statue CREAKS and LURCHES.

Luther RUSHES towards it.

 

INT. THE BOXING RING AT OLD TOWN. EVENING.

Diego’s ON THE GROUND, against AN ADVERSARY IN BLACK GLOVES. A single REFEREE oversees the lightweight match. Allison, newly aged 16, watches from the fifth row. A CROWD of BOXING FANS howl and shout. 

ALLISON

_Diego!_

She stops, regretting it. She didn’t mean to shout. He NOTICES HER, and is immediately irritated. There is BLOOD IN HIS MOUTH. Allison GRIMACES. 

The referee CALLS THE ROUND.

Diego IS PUSHED ONTO A STOOL. Water is poured on his face. His VOLUNTEER COACH reprimands him.

Allison CLIMBS INTO THE RING. The boxing fans curse and cajole her.

COACH

Hey. You can’t be in here. This your girlfriend, Yey-go?

 

ALLISON

Sister. I was invited.

 

COACH

Just this once.

She’s at her brother’s side. They STARE at each other.

Diego FROWNS.

DIEGO

You _weren’t_ invited. What the hell are you doing here? What if Dad finds out? 

 

Allison sighs.

ALLISON

Shut up. Your coach is going to kick me out. ( _beat_ ) I had nothing else to do.

 

DIEGO

Nothing else to do? What about Luther? Got tired of fucking Luther?

 

ALLISON

(angered)

You take that back. You —

 

Diego PUSHES HER.

DIEGO

 _You_ get out of here.

 

ALLISON

No. I wanted to see where you’re going off to all the time.

 

DIEGO

Did the crowd get your brain? You don’t care what I’m doing. 

 

ALLISON

Of course I care. 

 

DIEGO 

About me? Not likely.

 

ALLISON

Don’t be stupid.

 

DIEGO

There’s only one person you give a fuck about, and that’s yourself.

 

ALLISON

Why else would I be here if I didn’t care about you?

 

DIEGO

You have nothing else to do.

 

He spits at a corner. 

ALLISON

Neither do you. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re going through the motions. You’re done with it.

 

He doesn’t respond.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

We’re not as special as we think we are. Do you think anything’s going to come from this? 

 

DIEGO

What are you saying, then? I’m just like you? 

 

ALLISON

So what if I am? You’re too dumb to listen.

They look at each other. 

DIEGO

Stand in the front this time. I’ll pick you up later, and we’ll go home. Tournament ends at ten. If you —

 

ALLISON

I got it.

 

COACH

Break’s over. Better jump out of here, girlfriend.

She DUCKS OUT of the ring.

A BELL SOUNDS.

Diego and his adversary, head-to-head.

The adversary SWINGS.

Diego DODGES.

Allison WINCES.

Diego sends AN UPPERCUT to his adversary’s jaw.

 

EXT. THE DINING ROOM OF THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY. NIGHTTIME. 

We MOVE IN on Allison, aged 14, rising.

It is so quiet that a single step is a clamor. It is so still that a movement is exception. It is a deep contrast to the world that envelops it.

Vanya TURNS THE LIGHTS ON and SETS A PLATE DOWN on the table.

She SPOTS Allison.

ALLISON

It’s been months. It’s almost a year, really.

Vanya, at first, stares at her.

For a quiet moment, we CUT TO FIVE’S PORTRAIT in the LIVING ROOM.

ALLISON (OFF-SCREEN)

I know it’s hard. First Ben, then Five…

Her voice becomes choked.

Vanya looks contemplative.

VANYA

Was it something I told him?

Allison SQUEEZES HER EYES SHUT.

VANYA

Did I make him upset? Did I forget something?

 

ALLISON

 _You’re_ not the one who did it. None of it was you.

They linger, and each TAKE A SEAT at the table.

On the plate is a peanut-butter-and-jelly SANDWICH.

VANYA

It’s Dad’s fault.

They both SPLIT IT IN TWO and NIBBLE ON A HALF OF THE SANDWICH.

ALLISON

I’ll help you make another one.

 

EXT. A WASTELAND. TIME NOT PRESENT.

Allison, aged 29 again, STUMBLING THROUGH A FOG. There is nothing on all sides. She panics.

She keeps going.

There are NEWSPAPERS, scattered. Allison GRABS ONE. We MOVE IN on the paper. The HEADLINE states:

_WORLD STILL MOURNS THE BELOVED UMBRELLA ACADEMY._

_A TRAGIC ANNIVERSARY._  

Allison DROPS THE PAPER and KICKS IT away.

It OPENS on a PHOTOGRAPH, the SUPERIMPOSED FACE OF BEN.

Allison BACKS UP. There’s another PHOTO — FIVE. VANYA. KLAUS. DIEGO. LUTHER. ALLISON herself.

We MOVE OUT. Allison cannot escape.

ALLISON

That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s not him.

Her foot HITS A BODY. It’s Klaus.

She SCREAMS.

 

INT. HOLY MOTHER OF JESUS ADDICTION CENTER. AFTERNOON. 

Klaus LYING ON HIS BACK in a hospital bed, horizontally, legs hanging off the side, feet on the floor. He gets up at SITS CROSS-LEGGED. Allison, aged 21, SITS ACROSS FROM HIM, clutching the blankets. Klaus is drinking from a crumpled plastic WATER BOTTLE. There’s still a half-full GLASS OF WATER waiting on the side table.

KLAUS

So where’s everyone else? Where’s —

 

ALLISON

Don’t talk about Luther. I’m here to see you.

 

KLAUS

No alternative motives?

 

ALLISON

What would those be?

 

KLAUS

No bodyguards?

 

ALLISON

There were never bodyguards.

 

KLAUS

Huh.

He picks at the sheets, and his fingernails.

KLAUS (CONT’D)

(wavering)

Why would you do all of this?

 

ALLISON

Do what?

Klaus gestures.

KLAUS

This.

 

ALLISON

It’s not like I built this place. I’m just paying for it. 

 

KLAUS

How the fuck am I supposed to pay you back?

 

ALLISON

You’re my brother, Klaus.

 

KLAUS

Let me reiterate. How in God’s good fucking Earth am I supposed to pay you back?

 

ALLISON

Stop it.

 

KLAUS

I’d understand if Luther was in a pinch...

 

ALLISON

He would do the same thing. We all would have.

 

KLAUS

But little old me! What an honor!

 

ALLISON

Don’t say that.

Klaus drinks from his water bottle.

KLAUS

Are you ashamed of me, Allison? By me? For me? 

 

She hesitates. It is quiet for too long.

ALLISON

No, I’m not. I’d never be.

Klaus SMILES in a sickly way. 

KLAUS

That’s too bad.

 Allison COUGHS.

Klaus TILTS THE WATER BOTTLE in her direction.

She TAKES it. 

ALLISON

Is this laced?

Klaus SHRUGS. She DRINKS.  

KLAUS

It’s not.

He TAKES the half-full glass of water. They TOAST.

 

EXT. MAIN STREET. AFTERNOON.

It is raining. Allison, aged 17, HOLDS ON to Luther, piggy-back. Her FOOT hangs at in an awkward angle. She rests her cheek on his collar. 

ALLISON

I just wanted to see a goddamn _movie_.

 

LUTHER

The one in Spanish, right?

 

ALLISON

I mean, I didn’t think that guy was going to harass that poor woman. He didn’t _look_ very strong.

 

LUTHER

And I didn’t think you looked so — careless.

She STRIKES him once.

LUTHER

Ouch.

She’s smirking. She puts her chin on his shoulder.

ALLISON

Dad sent you, didn’t he?

 

LUTHER

No. He didn’t.

 

ALLISON

How’d you know I snuck out, then?

Luther SHRUGS.

The rain still falls.

LUTHER

You’ve been… sneaking out a lot lately.

 

ALLISON

Yeah.

 

LUTHER

Do you want to leave the Academy, Allison?

Allison SAYS NOTHING.

LUTHER (CONT’D)

Are you going to leave, just like Vanya?

She weighs her words.

ALLISON

Diego told me he’s been thinking about it.

 

LUTHER

Shit.

 

ALLISON

Hey, you can’t keep us cooped up here forever.

 

LUTHER

Us? What do you mean, ‘Us?’

 

ALLISON

Whatever. Them.

 

LUTHER

Okay?

 

ALLISON

And it’s not like we’re going to _forget_ about each other.

 

LUTHER

‘We!’ Allison, you said, ‘We.’

 

ALLISON

Okay?

 

LUTHER

Don’t — don’t you know what that means?

 

ALLISON

(heated)

All right, fine. Maybe I _want_ to go.

 

LUTHER

Why would you want to go?

 

ALLISON

Aren’t you _tired?_

 

LUTHER

It comes with the part.

 

ALLISON

Luther, I don’t want to _live my whole life here._

 

LUTHER

But it’s your _life_.

 

ALLISON

Then make them take it back! I don’t want it anymore.

 

LUTHER

Why would you _say_ that?

 

ALLISON

I _have_ to.

 

LUTHER

What if I made you stay?

 

ALLISON

Never speak to me again.

 

LUTHER

Why do you want to _leave_ me?

 

ALLISON

I’m _not_ going to leave you!

 

LUTHER

Then why are you going to _go?_

 

ALLISON

Are you even _happy_ here?

 

LUTHER

Of course I am!

 

ALLISON

That’s not it _. No one’s_ happy here.

 

LUTHER

I’m happy when I’m _with_ all of you.

 

ALLISON

Well, we’re — _miserable_. We were _raised_ miserable.

 

LUTHER

We’re a family. _You’re_ my family.

 

ALLISON

Families don’t always stick around.

 

LUTHER

They do. That’s what makes them family. ( _beat_ ) Who’s going to protect all of you?

 

ALLISON

Dad put up all those goddamn drawings on the walls, remember? Attack. Defend. Solar plexus.

 

LUTHER

That’s not what I meant.

 

ALLISON

And what else could you mean?

 

LUTHER

We owe it to the world.

 

ALLISON

The world never _gave_ us anything.

 

LUTHER

It gave us each other. Isn’t that enough?

 

ALLISON

It’s more than we deserve.

 

LUTHER

Don’t you want to _help_ people? I know I do. I’d do anything.

 

ALLISON

This isn’t the only way to help people. This is the _worst_ way to people.

 

LUTHER

It’s what we’re — _meant_ to do. We were born for this.

 

ALLISON

No, we weren't.

 

LUTHER

Allison.

 

ALLISON

What?

 

LUTHER

I don’t —

 

ALLISON

What?

 

LUTHER

I don’t know.

They realize that they’ve STOPPED WALKING.  

We MOVE OUT on the pair. Cars pass by slowly. Pedestrians cross.

It is a normal day for most.

ALLISON

Luther?

 

LUTHER

Yeah?

 

ALLISON

Luther.

 

LUTHER

(gently)

I’m here.

They PROCEED.

 

INT. CLAIRE’S BEDROOM. MORNING. 

CLAIRE wears a white blouse and matching shoes.

Allison, aged 27, SMILES at her.

ALLISON

You’re beautiful, baby. You’re the prettiest girl I know.

 Claire beams ear-to-ear, swaying left and right, in a dance. Then her face falls.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

What is it? What’s wrong?

Her daughter SAYS NOTHING.

Allison chews on her lip.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

Baby, if you don’t tell me, how am I going to fix it?

CLAIRE

Daddy told me not to tell you.

Allison is VISIBLY UPSET.

ALLISON

I heard…

She HESITATES.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

Come here, baby.

She EMBRACES her daughter tightly, like she’s afraid that Claire will disappear.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

I love you so much. Don’t let anyone tell you different. That’ll never change.

Claire NODS.

ALLISON (CONT’D)

Mommy loves you, Claire.

 

EXT. NOWHERE AND NONE. WITHOUT TIME.

Allison, aged 29 once more, alone.

Then ENTERS Allison, aged 13 and one-half, hair and uniform frizzed and singed from a homemade grenade.

ENTERS Allison, aged 12, in a black dress.

Allison, newly aged 16, smiling and sweaty from a show well-run.

Allison, aged 14, in nightclothes, the crumbs of a sandwich still stuck to her shirt.

Allison, aged 21, with a crumpled water bottle.

Allison, aged 17, flightless.

Allison, aged 27, a mother.

They FADE.

In front of Allison, aged 29, finite, is NUMBER THREE, aged four.

NUMBER THREE

I heard a rumor that you knew you were asleep.

* * *

She’s awake. 

The nightmares really did leave her with age. But now that she’s back to God-knows-when, Allison has come to the conclusion that they’ve caught up to her once more.

She sees it clearly, for just a second, fast-forward — but the dream steps away as quickly as it arrived.

Claire had nightmares, too. Allison knew just the remedy.

“Allison. Allison.”

She’s in Vanya’s room. Allison followed Luther here after they’d been sent to bed without ceremony. She said she was going to go to her room must have fallen asleep with her head in Vanya’s lap.

They can change things this time around. They should have known that they could have changed things the first time, too.

Allison props herself up.

“Vanya.”

It’s morning.

“Hi,” says Vanya, hoarse.

Allison takes her hand. Vanya flinches at this.

She decides it doesn’t matter. “Hi.”


	4. A Rock and a Hard Place

“I’m impressed by your lack of intelligence.” Five lifts his head from the kitchen counter and is greeted by the grotesque and disappointing face of Reginald Hargreeves. And Five feels like a fucking kid again, except that kids don’t normally get hangovers this bad. Though this isn’t a hangover. He just fell asleep. “You’ve lived in the Academy your entire life. I would assume you would know what is off-limits. That includes alcohol, Number Five.”

His monocle seems like it’s about to fall off.

What about Klaus? He’s right there.

And Five says, “Dad.”

The old man looks exhausted. He’s dressed for an outing, or a week away from home, prepped with a top hat and grey coat and all.

Five attempts to form a witty and appropriate retort, but then everything disappears again.

* * *

It’s seven o’clock in early day. The cycle repeats. Klaus is knocked out in the chair beside Five.

Is he fucking dead?

Five shakes him. “Klaus.” And shakes him. “Wake up, asshole, or I’m cutting your cock off.” And shakes him once more.

Klaus waves him away absentmindedly. He mumbles something about fucked-up faces, and an infantry, and Charlie.

Charlie. Well, fuck him for retaining information. But Five decides to rest easy.

He walks around. The walls, worn and finger-printed, are painted with tessellations. Doric columns made from marble, or maybe the Venetian kind of granite, hold up the second-floor balconies. Over here is the old couch, covered in blankets and throw pillows from international thrift-stores. There’s old statues from Burma, and the Philippines, and Colombia. The curtains are tasseled and fraying. Klaus and Allison would tie them as belts and sashes. The others got into it. Five would never join them.

This lamp right here has been replaced more times than Five can count. This lamp was given to them by some famous artist-type they’d saved in a museum. This lamp had only broken once. He remembers that. It was Five’s fault, definitely, but they collectively pinned it on Klaus. Ben and Luther had felt guilty and taken some of the blame. Eventually Five confessed. It took a couple months.

The shelves are heaving with books. Five runs his fingers down their spines and recognizes a couple titles — this one was a physics introspective he liked. Ben recommended it — Ben has probably finished every book in this house. Klaus and Luther found it boring, but of course they would. This one’s fiction, but it had enough biochem aspects in it that he couldn’t put it down. This one is supposed to be a classic, but it doesn’t hold up very well. Diego disagreed. They argued for weeks. And hey — this one is Allison’s favorite, since she always loved the modern-fantasy stuff.

And this is Vanya’s memoir, _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven._ He decides not to take it. He swears he’s got some of it memorized. There’s a whole chapter on him, like with the rest of his siblings. It’s flattering. And embarrassing.

Five would always trip over the carpet, every time he made a jump. It was almost habitual. And Vanya would always give him the ice packs with the cats. She knew he liked those the most, once. He’d never admit it.

All over are the taxidermied heads — there’s the lizards and snakes on the coffee table, too — the antlers over one fireplace — more antlers on wall — there’s the bison that Allison named Yak-Yak, when they were six, Five thinks — the name stuck — there’s the bear they used to climb on, until its arm broke off — under the boar’s head are magazine clippings of their interviews and the first edition of the comic book written about the six of them — Five has never gotten around to reading it, but Ben and Vanya had field days with it — and the chandeliers dangle from the arched Byzantine ceilings.

On the west wall is an oil painting of their father, vertical. It’s impressive enough, he supposes.

On the north wall is… a portrait of the seven of them, as they were when they were younger. Rather, it’s the versions of them that died.

Their faces are neutral, if not agitated. That’s accurate. They are in full uniform. Five, Allison, and Ben are sitting. Vanya, Diego, Klaus, and Luther are standing.

Their father appears to have left the house. Otherwise, all seven of them would have been up right now. They would have been eating breakfast in silence, or running drills down the hallways.

Where’s Mom? Where’s Pogo?

Speaking of breakfast.

* * *

Five doesn’t have any reliable caffeine in him, but he gets thinking anyway.

There are four dimensions, all interconnected, despite its differently-pointing directions and the so-called separation of its components, Time and Space: this is called the Space-Time continuum. In other words, space consists of three dimensions, while time consists of one, and they marry to create an endless, immortal line. The line has a width and length, curved by gravity. This curvature is what makes time slow down near black holes. And this continuum causes the orbits of the planets; it explains the universe; it expands.

Space and Time cannot exist without each other.

Yeah, that’s it.

Hubble saw that expansion first, in his twentieth-century telescope. It doesn’t matter where anyone looks, or where they’re situated exactly — the galaxies move apart from each other. At some point, they were all united. The would have been joined together in a mass, or in a point so dense that the universe began.

Everything — the sun rising, the cities, the boulevards, the world, the Academy — is engraved in Space-Time. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t falter. The line simply _exists,_  a forever-running object from past to future. A cross-section of Space-Time is a cross-section of history. The geometry from space can be taken from a single hour, or a minute, or a second.

Then there’s time travel.

It’s like talking to Klaus. Time travel is very stubborn, and very specific. There is an abundance of things that must be considered. It’s not unchangeable.

After all, Time is not independent. Neither is Space. Neither is anything.

So how does that explain alternate universes? How does that explain his situation? Where the fuck does he go from here?

Five remembers when he jumped forward — the isolation of it. He couldn’t think past the present. He didn’t think about how much _work_ it would take. Five really doesn’t often mull it over — it’s not glamorous — but now he’s had _time_ to mull over it. All he thought about back then was losing Ben, and on that note, losing Vanya, and Luther, and Diego, and Allison, and Klaus. They took up everything.

He was a really pissed thirteen-year-old.

And, well, of course he still thinks of his family. Obviously.

They’re what keep him spinning.

Klaus is up now, and limping around.

Five walks over and starts dragging him by the wrist.

“Oh,” says Klaus. “It _feels so good_.”

“Don’t be weird.” Five makes a mental note to lend him a fucking nightshirt.

“You don’t see anything for a while. Your brain goes absolutely fuck-all. But then you have to wake up again. What about that, huh? Consider — that I don’t want to wake up again.”

They just haven’t seen what Five has seen.

“Don’t say dumb shit you’ll regret,” Five tells him. He sits Klaus down at the kitchen table. Klaus slumps over. “I’m going to make you coffee, got it? Then we’re going to find some shit to eat. We didn’t get anything from Dad yesterday. We didn’t even get a word.” Five slaps him on the back. “You better not choke on your tongue while I’m gone.” Klaus is limp. “Okay.”

He makes the coffee in a clean-looking ceramic mug. Klaus prefers it with sugar and foam — Five remembers seeing that once.

And he sips the mug a little. Five likes foam, too.

When he returns, Klaus is snoring. Well, fuck. Should Five take this foamy coffee?

He shouldn’t.

So he sets it down carefully. Five finds the most comfortable-looking international-thrift-store blanket from the couch and drops it over Klaus, and puts a throw pillow under his brother’s head.

There, asshole.

* * *

All right.

He’s decided not to wake up his siblings. That would be a waste of time.

Time — is measured in nanoseconds, milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days. It is measured by the atomic oscillations — Klaus might call them wiggles, and Luther would call them waves, and Vanya would say they are sine curves — of the element cesium, with a precision to the nearest billionth.

But what is time _really?_

The human comprehension is completely imperfect. What if time was not a quantifiable, existing object, but a creation of the mind? Time might be a construct that was developed in evolution. Life is fast. What if people are so stupid that they can’t think of a better way to explain birth, and death, and joy, and tragedy? What if there is no better way?

Everything happens at once, eternally. Human brains don’t see it eternally. They are one-hundred-percent finite.

Cross-sections of history. There’s an idea about it. One inertial reference frame is one event — Five’s birth, maybe. Another inertial reference frame is another event — Five’s eventual death. Another inertial reference frame is everything that happens in between.

Five warps to his room, takes a dog-eared piece of chalk, and starts scribbling on the walls.

Isaac Newton thought of inertial reference frames first. He’s the fucking guy that _made_ physics, so Five figures that his concepts have held up this long for a reason. But there’s an error. In Newton’s eyes, time doesn’t change at all, even if the one observing it is moving. He wrote of a world with three irrefutably spatial dimensions. Time, and — as a result — its inhabitants, were confined to a vector. They could only move in one set direction with one set rate. It doesn’t change.

Then came Einstein. He’s the one that found out how light really acts in reference frames. Light is the _only_ thing that’s constant. It will always travel in the speed it has been proven to travel in, even as the observer travels at different _velocities_. Five writes it down for reference: c = 3.00 x 10^8.

 _Light_ is the only reliable part of time.

Yes, it is true that past, present, and future are an empty distinction, but it’s _not_ unchangeable. Perception of time differs from person to person.

Time is an illusion, but like a dream, it is not the same for everyone.

So that brings him to the math.

There’s an equation for the Space-Time continuum:

_ds^2 = c^2dt^2 — dx^2 — dy^2 — dz^2._

_in which ds (or Delta s) = infinitesimal distance element_

 Delta s, ds, can also be found by forming a right triangle using the Pythagorean theorem.

_ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2._

There are two different aspects in the equation for the Space-Time continuum.

  1. Coordinate time: the time as measured by 2 stationary observers in relation to the x-y coordinate system.
  2. Proper time: the time measured by 1 observer whose motion = 0.



They are related by the equation:

_dt = (gamma)d(tau),(gamma) defined to be equal to 1/sqrt. (1 — v^2/c^2)_

This relation is what allows time travel.

So time travel to the future is a fucking walk in the park compared to travel to the past. But the thing about jumping to the future is that it’s almost impossible to jump back. Five didn’t think about that the first time around.

Time travel occurs with Proper-time. As Five travels within Proper-time, and as his velocity increases from 0, the two stationary Coordinate-time observers would perceive him to be growing longer. As he, the Proper-time traveler, approaches the speed of light, c = 3.00 x 10^8, his mass increases. He has accelerated fast enough to time travel.

But he can’t go anywhere but forward. To go _back_ , Five would need to travel _faster_ than time. He’ll need a particle called a tachyon, which would let him go back in time. Five doesn’t have those. Tachyons are impossible.

Until the Commission.

The Commission used wormholes. That’s what their suitcases did. Or, well, _did_ do, until Five blew the most of them up.

Maybe he should have taken one. They understand this better than he does.

Well, fuck them.

Wormholes.

Traversable wormholes have no horizons or remarkable tidal forces that fucks up with human bodies, so they are relatively safe to jump in and out of. But they need to be held open, or propped up like stick through a hut, by negative energy density — exotic matter. The Commission had a shit-ton of exotic matter, and Five wasn’t sure how to get to it.

Then he realized that he fucking _is_ exotic matter.

It’s planted through him. That’s why he can jump. That’s why he’s _here._

The whole thing should be impossible. It’s an odd circumstance, but he accepts it. He’s alive, anyway. He’s gotten this far.

But specifically? Alternative universes? That dumbass shit? If time is an immortal line, then why has this specific cross-section been changed so significantly? Where did Five go _wrong?_

Alternate universes are a possibility. Reality is subjunctive; hazy. Particles, such as electrons, don’t have to stay in one place. They can be anywhere at once, though they maintain their specific properties — this is called superposition. It’s all in different states.

At this point, Fives hands are covered in white-chalk dust.

But, with what is known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics, there is a reality — or should Five say, a “reality” — where Five hasn’t done the math. Therefore, there is no dust on his hands. There is the pinching-off that begins at that decision — a superposition of dust versus no dust. There is a “reality” where he never traveled back home from the apocalypse, and a “reality” where he did. Pinching-off. Superposition. There is a “reality” where he was never born, and a “reality” where he was. Superposition.

So what’s real and what isn’t? What exists, and what can be considered false? Nothing and everything.

In the immortal line of Space-Time, there _might_ be branches. Decisions, and decisions, and decisions.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation is:

  1. A mathematical theory that follows the evolution of time in the quantum state of the (one) Universe.
  2. The inseparable relationship between the Universe and human experiences.



But it’s just an _interpretation_. Interpretations are subjective and opinionated. In Five’s opinion, it’s bullshit. Why would it apply?

Schrödinger thought it up. Five despises it. It’s vague. What are “experiences?”

It’s just _like_ Schrödinger to be fucking baffling. He thinks of Schrödinger’s fucking cat. Everyone brings it up. Ben probably knows a lot about it — Vanya, too.

There’s poison in the box, and there’s a cat. If the poison has been knocked over, the cat is dead. If the poison remains capped, the cat is alive. The only way to find out is to open the box.

The only way to find out is to — open the box.

That’s the fucking scientific method or something. Question. Background research. Hypothesis. Observation. Conclusion. Question: if this happens, what will happen? Background research: this the way other people think it happens. Hypothesis: if this happens, then this will happen, because of this. Observation: this happens because this happens because Five saw it with his own two fucking eyes. Conclusion: this is why. Conclusion: This is the answer.

Oh.

Shit.

Oh, God.

That’s it. Is that it? That’s — it! Right?

He has no fucking clue!

So he’ll go for it.

He’ll disprove alternate reality. Or prove it. He’ll keep his mind open just a little.

Five puts his chalk down. It’s a nearly-useless stub.

And Five takes a breath, and makes the jump in time.

* * *

The room is covered in dust. Fuck, it’s just like that fucking warehouse Diego dropped into once while working off the grid, and the girls he found — fuck, he’s not going to remind himself of that — _fuck_ , he hates this. He coughs into his elbow. Chances are, this room hasn’t been opened in years. Or maybe. Ten, eleven months, he’s estimating.

Figures.

Five is a little shit. Where’d he fucking _go?_ He can’t just run off anymore. Doesn’t he know what that _means?_ If he fucking abandons them again — it doesn’t matter that the first time was an accident.

Where’s Vanya and Allison? 

Diego’s not gonna think about Vanya and Allison.

He’s not going to think about Vanya. God.

Diego has never been too keen on doing what he’s supposed to do. But this is different. This will _help_ everyone. 

And then he’s thinking about Patch. 

“He’s not in here,” Diego calls out. “Luther — Ben, Klaus — did you hear me? Five’s not here, either.” They don’t respond. “ _Guys.”_ Huh.

The room is dark, but a window is open. The air is flecked with grey.

Fuck.

Now he’s curious.

He walks in and flicks on the lights.

There’s a bed.

There’s Mom, in her old polka-dot dress and apron.

She wears a closed-mouth smile. She stares at Diego, but she doesn’t say anything.

She isn’t moving.

“Mom,” says Diego. Who did this to her? Fuck. He knows. He _knows_ who did this. It’s _clear_. “Mom.” He hates it — Diego fucking _hates_ it — don’t remind him, don’t _remind_ him of _anything_ — this is the person who was at his side every day. This is the person who cleaned his cuts and bruises from fights. She listened to him. She spoke for him. This is the person who _loved_ him, or at least seemed to love him — and they threw her into a fucking empty room — _alone_ —

“Master Diego.”

It’s Pogo.

“Why would —” he doesn’t know how. “I —” God. Goddammit.

“It’s been… a terribly long time.” He stops, as if to collect himself. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll wake up Grace.”

* * *

“Can you walk?” Allison asks her. Vanya tells her she’s okay, but Allison still holds onto her arm. “Dad didn’t give us any food last night.” She starts stammering, like she’s been caught. “I — I mean, _you_ haven’t had any actual food. And we forgot to take the croissants from the diner.”

The diner. Vanya can vaguely recall the diner. She saw her siblings arguing from outside the window. She thinks she heard her name a few times, but it’s not a very clear memory. But she knows, for some reason, that the ground was cold.

God. Vanya feels the same way she did when she was _twelve_. She feels shorter, and jumpier. She’s like a grace note played too quickly.

Why is there hair in her eyes? Didn’t she cut her bangs back when she was a teenager? (She had done it herself, with safety scissors from the basement. Afterwards, Diego asked her to give him a trim, and she did. The request trickled down the the rest of her siblings.)

She talks in ties and slurs and hooks. “Everything's so _blurry_.” Like the start of the _Zigeunerweisen,_ by Pablo Sarasate. Three flats in the key signature. Four-four time. Right hand coordination. An almost chromatic scale. Nine notes per beat. She just keeps her left hand down for one part. “I don’t…”

“We’ll explain,” says Allison. He grip on Vanya is tighter. They’re going down the stairs. “Five will explain. Dad didn’t — you know, never mind. Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s fine.” It’s obviously not. Vanya hears it in her voice. What is she not saying? No one _tells_ her anything. No one ever has. She’ll never — “Vanya, you’re scaring me.”

(Scaring her.)

The walls seem like they’re shaking, and then they aren’t.

* * *

They come into the living room. “Five was just here,” Klaus says, crouched on the floor. Vanya hears Diego’s voice replying, then Luther’s. “I don’t know. I don’t — I have no fucking idea why —” he looks up. He stands. Vanya thinks about the year they were fourteen. The six of them had to practice standing in a line when they would meet the President, and Vanya held the timer to make sure they’d do it right.

Diego and Luther are still. They look at each other, but it is only for a moment.

“Hey — hey, there, Van-Van,” says Klaus. Then Luther steps forward. Diego puts his arm in front of him, like a warning.

They’re all in uniform. Matching. Dry-cleaned. They all look thirteen-years-old. Vanya’s whole life must have been a vision, or an illusion, or a hallucination. She must have never gotten older, or done anything of use.

It comes back to her in a flood.

Oh, God.

(She doesn’t get it.)

Shit. Allison, Allison — how can her sister forgive her? This cannot be solved with action and apology. God, how can _anyone_ forgive her?

Vanya wasn’t even led. She wasn’t blind. She held her own actions.

(She has a hard time remembering that she was young, once.)

She was angry. She was so, so angry.

But that’s all she had.

Nothing and no one could take that away from her. Maybe they could take they rest of her — her life, her potential, and her choice — they couldn’t take how she felt. They couldn’t take away her doubt and fear. They couldn’t take away her certainty.

They couldn’t take away her retribution.

Vanya is not enough on her own. _Those_ made her enough, even with the destruction that joined her. Even with —

Oh, God, God, why did she do it? Why was it what she fucking wanted?

Did he know? Did her father know, and smother her?

He should have killed her, then. She should have been a mission that the Umbrella Academy was sent to complete.

But ultimately, wasn’t she?

It was still what she _wanted_. (Vanya cannot deny that, or what follows. Maybe that’s why they are so afraid. She can't be taught. No wonder her concertos are messy.)

It was the first thing she did that she knows was really _her._

She doesn’t feel the need for penance.

She was not justified in what she did, but she knows so deeply that — she wasn’t wrong.

(Is she being selfish, maybe? Then what of it? The Hargreeves are a selfish, stupid breed. They don’t pick up after themselves. They fight without thinking of the destruction. They wait for the next day and hope it’s better. She’s part of that, and she knows it.)

The world all seems to have reset. She looks at her hands, one wrapped in her sister’s — they are young girls’ hands. These are young girls’ selves. Maybe these aren’t young girls’ minds — young girls don’t act so mindful and kindly, the way Allison has acted — but there was no consequence but reversion.

But what if there wasn’t? What if she had really —

That’s not what happened. Vanya doesn’t _know_ what happened after the notes fell from the page.

She wishes she didn’t hurt her siblings.

Do they understand?

Allison understands. (And one person might be enough.)

Oh, God, was this always _Vanya?_ What happened to the old version of her? The one with the timer, and the timid face?

They must hate her.

Vanya still feels dizzy. She still must be asleep — Ben is right in front of her. Ben who liked oranges. Ben who defused every fight. Ben who Klaus used to say he heard from beyond. Ben who is her brother. Ben is dead, and he must hate her for living. 

She thought they’d never see each other again. She thought that everyone was a liar. They were lying to her, and Ben Hargreeves would never speak to her until she died. 

Allison lets her move.

Vanya brings her brother towards her and doesn’t let go.

She doesn’t question it.

She wishes she had thought to say goodbye before he had went away.

Alban Berg wrote his _Violin Concerto_. The piece shatters and rebuilds all at once. It begs for resolution. Triplet, _rubato_. It clashes with dissonance. _Subito un poco energico._ He dedicated it to the angel he lost to the stars, or so they say — and the _Chaconne,_  so methodical and musical that Vanya still can’t play it correctly — Bach wrote it for his wife. He wrote it after she had died, and left him forever.

There was a reason for everything.

(Even if she’s earned her own death.)

She still _cares_. She has kept them with her.

Oh, God.

Please, please don’t hate her.

She’s a villain now. She’s an enemy to them, even. She took without asking. (Pencils and necklaces and powers and secrets — Vanya thinks she always took without really asking.) Vanya is the world they oppose. Vanya is their antithesis.

But that’s the one thing she asks.

* * *

Ben’s starving. He hasn’t eaten in hours.

“We’re dead, then,” Vanya says. “Five’s bolted off, and so has — our dad.”

“Yeah,” Allison says. She looks at all of them, as if for reassurance. Ben’s the only one who nods.

“We couldn’t find him,” Klaus says, rocking himself. “I’m fucking — I don’t know. He’s a bitch. I hate him. It's just.”

Yeah.

God, Five better be all right. He _has_ to be.

They all sit on the floor, under the table in the basement, even if there’s plenty of seats available around the house. They’re comfortable being snug, besides. Or uncomfortable. Ben can’t actually tell at this point — Five’s missing, Klaus is feeling discouraged, Allison’s watching Vanya, Vanya’s hands are twitching, Diego looks like he’s going to explode, and Luther’s trying not to hit his head on the ledge.

He should say something. Shit.

He should say _anything_.

There were times when it was just — easy for them to speak to one another. Everything was fair game. Then Ben guesses that they felt the detachment as their numbers started dwindling. He’s probably to blame for that part.

Well. Sort of.

And Ben kind of never thought they’d miss him. He thought they’d let go after the list was finished.

Ben knows _he_ missed them. But he gave up after he thought he was finished.

His family never forgot him. Or they didn’t want to. They’re very pigheaded like that.

He doesn’t want to say it’s a nice feeling. No one ever _wants_ Ben. There’s pairs in the seven of them, groups. Sometimes Allison and Luther. Allison and Vanya. Klaus and Diego. Diego and Luther. Ben’s circulating outside of that. His first family probably didn’t want him, either — spontaneous childbirth must have thrown them off — so they gave him away.

The only thing Ben did to be _wanted_ was die.

It’s… yeah.

Sweet. Great.

“Are you,” says Ben, to no one in particular. “Are we.”

Blue light.

A crack. A sudden heat, and everyone’s crawling — scrambling — Luther bangs his head on the table, and it flips over — papers fly — knives fly, forks fly, spoons fly — and they stop in the air before anyone is hit, and Ben realizes that Vanya’s making all the furniture levitate —

Five appears. He crumples to a heap on the floor. His clothing is a few sizes too big on him — he seems to have lost his left shoe — and he’s bleeding. Or, there’s blood on him. Ben won’t decide which is worse.

 _There_ he is, then.

They were all going crazy.

Five’s hands pat on the ground, like he’s making sure it’s solid. Then he cranes his neck at them, breathing heavily.

“Fuck,” Five says. “ _Fuck_.”

Vanya shrinks back. The furniture clangs.

The rest of them scold his ass off.


	5. So Sharply a Silhouette

The soil of the moon is silver, and it clings. Luther can’t wash the bulk of it off even if he tries.

It’s called Regolith. There’s asteroidal samples in it, and he’s been sent to collect it. There’s the residue of planets. He finds basalt under the impact basins. Anorthosite gets thrown out after collisions. Needles of orange glass comes from old lava fountains. Breccia comes from the mixing of all this lunar surface shit. It’s found in itself, and among cracks and mare. Regolith’s a lot easier to pick up in the anorthosite highlands, where it’s around sixty-five feet deep. One thousand miles’ radius of lunar ground, with an exosphere.

Luther didn’t know these things before, but, well, he knows now. He’s had a lot of time to learn. The Moon is unfamiliar, yet always the same.

Wake up. Gather. Sleep. Wake up. Send supply. Gather. Sleep.

Because nothing is weathered here. Nothing ever washes away, and if it does, there’s been some sort of horrible change. Otherwise, it’s just the turn of the Earth, from far away, and the void of day and night, passing, and the quiet. It’s quiet here. Luther grew up with constant hassle and constant noise. He grew up with laughter, and shouting, and fighting.

God. They’d fight about their uniforms, and T.V. crossovers, and each other’s things. There was no sacred ground. Luther didn’t think he’d ever miss it.

He imagines what it would be like to see them again.

How would they react? Would they cry? They wouldn’t. Maybe Klaus would. And Vanya. Diego would pretend he isn’t. Allison would hit him, and duck her head. Maybe they would cry, then.

There’s ice on the lunar South Pole. The gravity here is one-sixth the gravity of Earth. 

What about Five, or Ben? Does Ben see nothingness? Does Five look up at the sky, wherever he is?

Do all of them look up at the sky?

Do they think of him still?

He thinks of them every day. Vanya and Diego and Allison used to send letters and messages, but the return rate must have been too damn slow.

He’s kept all them all.

Yeah. If he came back, they’d greet him. They’re his family. But now they’ve formed their own lives. What if it would be just like he was alone again?

He’s an afterthought.

It _is_ beautiful here. And it’s quiet like he’s gone. Will the stars take him over?

He’s doing important work.

He’s doing this so that the world doesn’t have to.

That means something.

Luther just has to live every day.

* * *

Everything’s normal.

Oh, God — Goddammit — his brain. It’s stomped-up shit and cotton balls. It feels like he’s being dragged. Once, after jumping for the Commission, he got a migraine so bad his legs went slack for six hours — it was good thing he had a functional trigger-finger, and a firearm that served just as well. Well, maybe that wasn’t a good thing for all parties involved. The aura got him ready.

But Five didn’t even get a warning this time. Now he feels half-blind; when he holds his arm in front of his face, he has splotches of pinkish-brown in place of thumbs and pinkies. He’s fairly sure he’s still got thumbs and pinkies. He can’t make out any words or letters, either, and he can’t read the smears of white and chalk on his wall. There’s a ringing in his left ear, and the other one’s not picking up any sound at all. He suddenly feels like he hasn’t had a bite in ten days — he knows what that’s actually like — and he’s parched enough to start a drought. And his muscles ache like _fuck_. But he knows he’ll recover from these soon enough.

A second passes, and it’s like he’s gone unconscious. Another second, and he’s back. This is normal. It’s probably nothing.

The eyesight is really starting to get to him, though. Color’s not the only important thing around. Five would appreciate seeing _details_ , too. Details are important things.

Either way, he made a jump. That doesn’t mean he’s entered some sort of parallel universe. That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s just in — this afternoon.

He should have taken Klaus’s fucking coffee.

What now?

He’s still in his pajamas, so that would mean that Five should change into something more fitting. Where’s his closet? He sticks his arms out in front of him — the air moves. He lets his fingers squirm. He pulls at nothing. Five better not trip on something stupid — _fuck_. Fuck, what the fuck! Fuck! What the _fuck_ was that? It’s on his _foot._   _Fuck_. Why is —

Chalk. It’s chalk, probably. Shit. Fucking. Gross.

How’s he going to function? Allison and Vanya will think he’s drunk. Time travel just has that kind of aftershock.

Okay. He’s managed this far. The sleeves feel loose on his wrists, and his shorts are more like capris pants, but they’re on. Maybe Diego or Klaus got tired of doing their laundry and raided his closet. But they were never the same coat size — maybe it was Ben, then. In that case. Unless he had the growth spurt he’s always wanted.

This is the doorknob. All right. He turns it — open door. This is the hallway. This is the wall. Fuck, okay, the stairs. One, two, three, four, five. Okay. Where is he now? Where are his siblings?

Something slams into him, square in the head.

Fuck.

This does _not_ help his headache.

But all right.

Five makes a jump; he’s six feet backwards. He gets on his feet. He doesn’t know where his opponent is, and he can’t _hear_ anything. He takes a blow to the gut. Another to the jaw, like shatter. Something’s wrapped around his ankle, and he falls heavy. He’s dragged. He’s separated. He snags on something sharp — the hesitance is enough to let him jump again. In a heap he goes. Shit. Up, _up —_ he’s up. And soon comes a whip to his head — Five recoils.

There’s more than one person here.

Shit. Okay. Five can’t compete in these conditions, so he has to go _back._ But he’s in disrepair.

Fuck.

Fine.

There’s a force on him, keeping him stuck — it’s like he’s being thrown, or lifted. Up again. Then back on the floor. He reaches and slides his hands — _Goddammit_ , he’s _cut_ himself — he can’t assess the wound, but it _stings._ Hisopponent must have flung something fragile at him: a vase. The shards will do. This one. He’ll take it. His ears pop. Even better, the ringing sound has diminished slightly. There’s the rush of air above him — Five isn't oriented enough to avoid it. But he knows where one opponent is now, or where they might be — he closes his eyes and gets there — he collides into flesh. Center body. Footsteps. He’s being approached. A single opponent. He takes his makeshift weapon and slices through, the glass singing, and a grunt — descent.

A cry.

 _No_.

“Vanya?” Oh, shit. God, please, God — “ _Vanya!_ ” Is it her? It sounds like her — Five might be delirious, but it’s her. No, please, God — no one would listen to him when they were younger. No one but her — he was wounded, once, shot, when they were kids. Dad thought she was too upset to see him, but she’d sneak into her room with books — for a long time, he didn’t want to die because he knew she’d actually _mourn_ him —

He hears glass. He hears objects coming towards him. Five ducks and covers — he deflects with his jumps. He isn’t hit. He’s pulled. A rope or string like slime wraps around him, suffocating — he digs his nails. Five jumps. There’s a thump of something heavy. A scream, almost familiar — it makes Five’s hands shake — he follows the sound. He makes a twist — a neck snaps. The motion is routine. His eyes focus and turn.

Oh, God.

 _Ben_.

What has he done?

That’s not Ben.

It’s real, and it’s blinding, but it’s not Ben.

Oh, fuck.

Schrödinger’s cat wasn’t bullshit.

But he’s grabbed by the collar and thrown across the room. It must be Luther. There’s a finger on his chest. Allison. She speaks, but he can’t hear much but mumbling. He hurries away. A knife grazes his cheek — Diego. _Fuck_ — Five feels a carve at his back. A blade in his arm, through his bicep. Goddammit. He shouts. He’s pinned. Every move pours. In front of him now — his brother. Diego is locked. His knife is raised. He slings. Five jumps. He sees the ceiling — he sees fixtures and lights. The knife finds a wedge. It’s stuck in the drywall. Diego turns, and Five barrels at him — Diego doesn’t stay down. He throws his knife. Five catches it. Diego takes position — Five jumps. The knife is slot in Diego’s forehead. Five can see his brother’s face past blur.

It’s not his brother. It’s not his brother —

He can’t breathe. Luther has him held to choke — Five writhes. He can't kick away. Fuck. He shifts out. Luther’s fast, and finds him again. Five prepares a jump, but he’s grabbed in midair. Onto the ground. Five finds nothing but jittering images — and debris. Debris from Vanya. Five jumps and doesn’t look. He phases through and past. Luther’s embedded and bleeding. He topples. Five’s numb.

Not his brother. Luther would have killed him if Five didn’t do anything — no, this _isn’t Luther_.

Allison. Allison, swinging something as if by a chain. “I heard a rumor that you —”

He covers his ears.

How’s he going to get to her?

“I heard a rumor. I heard a rumor.” He hides. God. God. “I heard a rumor.” He gets snippets of it, but it’s not enough to take him. “Where’d you go?” Not Allison. It’s not Allison. “ _I heard a rumor that I found you_.”

He jumps. He fucking miscalculated. It’s the rumor. He's in front of her. She hurtles towards him. Her weapon is fast and he can’t tell what it is. It collides with him. He feels scrape and scratch. She looks down on him. She opens her mouth. Five escapes. He’s on the second-floor balcony now. Something heavy — the chandelier. Splinter. Fracture. Fall.

Allison doesn’t say another word.

Is he done? Please. Five wants to be done.

There’s Klaus, or the stained shape of him.

“I’m next, I bet,” he says. He’s drinking coffee.

Five can’t find his voice. “What’s my name?” No response. Did he speak at all? “What’s my _name?_ I told you.”

“You’re Number Five,” Klaus says. “You sold us out. You left us for dead, and you come back anyway.”

Five tries to leave. He can’t. God, he can’t.

He hears people. He’s surrounded on all sides. Encroaching. Phantoms turned physical. Pulling him apart. Five grapples with them. The floor is welcoming as always. There’s metal around him. A bar, sharp. He takes it. Jump. Jump. Jump.

A half of Klaus’s body hits the carpet.

Five squints. He can see vaguely in front of him.

Klaus’s coffee was black. No sugar. No foam.

He looks at the ceiling. He doesn’t want to see what’s around him.

There’s a Five in this universe. A Five who will look around him and ask.

This house is not his.

He has the strength to leave.

* * *

Allison fills her cup with water. She takes a second one for Vanya, and hands it to her.

Diego’s picking the glass out of Five’s hands, there on the living room table. He keeps glancing over at Vanya, then at Luther. Luther’s talking to Ben. Ben’s trying to calm him down. Klaus is lying on the ground, mumbling.

Vanya tilts her head. They drink in sequence.

“Ow,” says Five, wincing. “Stop it. Fuck you, Diego.”

“Shut up,” says Diego. “I’m not as good as Mom.” Apparently, Pogo’s still waking her up.

Five winces, but he’s still letting Diego wrap bandages on his arm. He’s still letting him clean the blood off of his face. He’d never let them do shit when they were kids.

Claire doesn’t have siblings. She’ll probably never have siblings, with luck. Oh, God.

Are they going to keep finding each other like this? Are they going to play at independence? Allison doesn’t know. They’re all stupid. Everyone wants to save the goddamn world. They can’t even take care of themselves. Klaus didn’t know how to tie his shoes until they were twelve. Luther and Vanya had to do it for him.

“Five,” says Allison, “next time you go, are you going to take me with you?” She swirls her cup around. “I want to see it too.”

Her siblings turn to look at her.


	6. Half-Cyborg, Silicon, and (Forever) Unopposed

 I. Title Page.

_The Horror._

By Ben Hargreeves.

* * *

II. Table of Contents.

I. Title Page.

II. Table of Contents.

III. Somewhere Far Interior.

IV. East Addressed.

V. Best Within State.

VI. In the Shape of a Dove.

VII. Made from Hair and Twine.

VIII. Corrective Tape.

IX. Appendix.

X. Acknowledgements.

* * *

 III. Somewhere Far Interior.

The corridor is too dark — too narrow, too small — for Ben to see anything. It’s a basically a _cervix_ , he figures. Mom gave them that talk. God. Yikes. Well, anyway, it’s foggy in here. He doesn’t know why he’s never had glasses — maybe they never got around to it. That’s probably it, now that he’s thinking about this. In his twelve years of life, eyesight has been the least of his problems.

It feels like he’s leaving something behind. Something quiet. Something nice and wrapped.

He follows the path, and ends up in a room. It looks almost like Klaus’s. It’s kind of dark here, too, like the corridor, but the stark scorch marks on all the furniture is indication.

Klaus is standing on his bed, stringing something to the light fixture. It’s a belt.

“Hey, Klaus,” says Ben. But at first, his brother doesn’t hear him. “What’s going on? Don’t be weird.” Klaus doesn’t acknowledge him. Instead, he wraps the belt around his neck and makes a loop — _wait, wait_ — “ _Klaus_ , _Klaus_.” Nothing ever says it’s _like_ this — Ben’s throat is a twisting pit —  

Klaus sees him.

“Oh,” he says, “my God. Oh, my God. _Benny_ —” he’s crying. Ben never knows what to do when his brothers and sisters cry. “Benny, you came back.” He just kind of stays, and waits until they’re ready to talk to him coherently. It’s not always the best method. They’re never ready to talk. “Ben, oh, my _God_. I thought — I love you so much. Ben, I fucking love you —”

He steps forward and flails. _No,_ _wait, wait —_ Ben catches him, but _doesn’t_ catch him — Klaus kicks through and past him — _wait, wait, wait, no — stupid — God, please — please, please —_

Then the belt swings and drops. Klaus follows, then the light fixture. They topple onto his bed and floor in a plume. Man. Oh. Oh, God, shit, is he hurt? Ben doesn’t know what to do if Klaus is hurt. Out of the six of them, he’s the most elusive.

“Klaus,” Ben says again. And Klaus barrels towards him fiercely, like he’s trying at a hug. But he trips and falls on the other side of the room. He is otherwise unfazed. Good. Okay. Ben can process now. “Oh, my _God_ , were you —”

His brother is whimpering. And now Ben has to stop shouting in his face. “ _Ben_.” He says it strangely. He starts mashing together his words. Klaus is frightening him. “It was so hard. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. You don’t know — you don’t know a _thing_. You don’t know how much I tried. You don’t know what it was like. It took so long. I couldn’t find you. It’s like you weren’t real.” He holds his hands up, like he’s going to grab Ben’s face and shake him — he’s done it before, and it’s always a headache — but he doesn’t. He hovers. “I love you.”

Something’s really, really wrong. “You said that,” says Ben. Klaus has never said that before. He doesn’t talk to Ben much, actually. Klaus just jostles Ben around for a short while, wordless, and leaves without a second thought. Diego’s the one he has a secret handshake with. That’s the ticket. “You’re an idiot.” He doesn’t get it. “Why would — why would — what did you think you were _doing?_ ” Now he feels like _he’s_ going to cry. “We’re _twelve_.” That’s too young for _anything_.

Ben used to think it was so old.

It kind of is, though. Well. Kind of.

Then Klaus puts his hands down.

“Fourteen,” he says. “Almost fifteen.”

And now Ben’s remembering everything.

* * *

IV. East Addressed.

They take an Academy tour. “See?” says Klaus. He sounds choked, but he coughs it away. “The stairs didn’t change. The lamps didn’t change. Neither did the animal heads. Or the animals. Remember Yak-Yak? He’s still almost the same.”

Ben hasn’t been in his house for a very long time. “Who’s going to clean up your room?” he wants to know. “You can’t just leave it like that.”

“Mom can do it,” says Klaus, smearing his nose over his sleeve. “And Pogo. Well, if I decide to tell them anything.”

“That’s not... right,” Ben tells him. “It’s not right that you wanted to —” he doesn’t want to finish that. It’s hard to think about. But Ben isn’t sure if he’s surprised or not.

They’ve all _thought_ about it, probably. They’ve joked about it. Threatened it. Promised it. God, but Klaus doesn’t… 

He doesn’t know.

Klaus turns around. He looks like he’s about to explain, or refute, but then he doesn’t. He just slides his hands in his pockets. He slides his hands in his pockets and doesn’t utter a single word.

But then he seems to decide to speak. “Why aren’t you all shot up? Why aren’t you all — exploded?”

“I don’t know,” says Ben.

Klaus doesn’t seem to accept it.

“Why,” he asks, “did you take so long to come and see me?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me,” says Ben, meaning it. Klaus stares at him. “What?”

“That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” says Klaus.

Ben didn’t expect that. “I’m just as lost as you are.” There must be _something_ they can do. “We can ask Five.” He knows things.

“He ran away,” Klaus says plainly.

Oh.

They’ve all done predictable things.

“You shouldn’t want to be dead.”

That’s the worst thing he can say. Shit. God. He wishes he had never said it. He wishes he was — back in a corridor shaped like a cervix. But what would have happened to Klaus? Ben can’t let anything happen to Klaus. He wishes he came back in time to see Five again.

Where are the rest of his siblings?

Klaus is shrugging.

“I was just bored, I guess.”

That can’t be true. 

He’s crying again. They’re crying, and it feels more than stupid.

* * *

V. Best Within State.

They all meet up in Allison’s room after dinner. Ben’s used to being in the loop, but today, he’s sitting behind Klaus. It’s uneasy.

Oh, God. Allison. _Allison._ When had she pierced her ears like that? She’s not wearing the necklace she always had, and she looks so much older. How long has it really been? She isn’t smiling. Allison always smiles, in that half-concerned, half-hoping kind of way. It’s missing.

And Luther. He’s so much _taller._ It’s not fair. The rest of them will never get that kind of growth spurt. And Luther’s hair is much darker. He didn’t dye it, did he? Maybe Diego pushed him into it. They‘re poking fun at each other all the time. It must have come to the point of contempt. But Luther wouldn’t dye his hair. This is probably a natural process.

Diego. Diego’s still tapping his fingers — at this point everyone thinks its background noise — but he’s not as restless as he’s always been. He’s not as charged. He’s not as energized. He looks like he hasn’t slept right in a long time, but Diego’s always been a night owl. Still. It’s as if he’ll pass out on the floor in under a minute. 

They’re huddled. 

Why aren’t they talking? They’re supposed to be talking about nothing and everything all at once. 

“We need to do something about this,” says Ben. “Don’t you notice? What happened? Guys. Guys.”

Oh. Right. Okay. Yeah.

Klaus glances at him for a second, puts up his palm, and nods. Ben nods back. God. It’s infectious. 

“I saw Ben today,” Klaus says.

The others don’t give him the time of day.

Allison rubs her eyes. “Klaus,” she says. “Can we just…”

“What?” says Diego. “What are we doing? It’s not going to be — it’s _not_.”

“She’s not talking to you,” says Luther.

“I was,” says Allison, “kind of.”

“We — we want to get our brother back, right?” Diego says. “We have to figure out how we’re going to do that.”

“We’re still on that?” Luther asks. “You haven’t mentioned that in a week.”

“Of _course_ we’re still on that,” says Allison. “Five might still be out there. What if something happened to him?”

Luther stands. “It’s been _forever_ since he left,” he tells them.

“So?” goes Allison. “Don’t you care about him?”

“I _do,_ ” says Luther. “I care about him more than anything.”

So Allison points. “Then why aren’t you sitting down?”

“It’s… useless,” says Luther. “We’re never going to know what happened to him. What if — what if —”

“Oh,” says Diego. “So — so you just want us to _move on?_ How — why would you —” 

“I didn’t say that.” And Luther is starting to steam. “I didn’t say _any_ of that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

Diego lashes out. “Then don’t say shit!” 

“Hold on,” says Ben. “You’re not helping each other. Nothing is happening.”

Wait. 

He forgot.

The room boils regardless.

“Fine,” says Luther. “You won’t expect anything from me.” 

Allison gets up. “I’m going to get some water. I don’t want to — I’m going to get some water.” She goes for the exit.

Luther pauses, then tails after her. Diego looks at Klaus. Ben thinks, just for a second, that their brother is looking at him, too, but he knows that isn’t the case.

They open the door. Vanya stumbles in.

There’s a standstill. 

Allison, Luther, and Diego file out.

Vanya’s hands are folded. “What did you say about Ben?”

* * *

VI. In the Shape of a Dove.

Ben sits on the table. It’s morning. Everyone must have had their daily dose of airplane-tutorial phonography. Ben didn’t get to see it. He was in Allison’s room, and he was with Klaus, and then he wasn’t. Resurrection must be a sporadic deal.

“Tell her that I miss her, too,” he says.

It’s like Vanya’s looking straight at him. It’s got an almost surreal aspect to it.

“Benny misses you, too, Van-Van,” Klaus says. He holds onto a box of tissues. He claims it’s allergies. 

“I miss her a lot,” Ben adds.

“He misses you a lot.” 

Vanya takes a tissue. “It’s not fair. Ben never got to write anything, like he wanted. He’ll never get older. He never got to do anything that he should be doing.”

He doesn’t know how to answer her. “What am I supposed to be doing?” There’s a lull. “Klaus.”

“Oh,” says Klaus. “Ben — Ben’s asking, uh. What is he supposed to be doing right now?”

“Talking to me,” says Vanya. “In the flesh. Telling me all his jokes. Telling me his stories.” Before they got a television, they’d stay up all night making shit up. They had a running plot. A princess saved a prince. A robot gained sentience. It was as creative as eight-year-olds could get. “If he was here, Five wouldn’t have left.” She retries. “Not that... I don’t know. Yeah.”

Their siblings pile into the living room. Their free-time hour is almost over.

Vanya gets off of the couch. “Klaus, let’s keep talking in your room.”

“No,” he says immediately. “No, you can’t go in there. I mean — I fucked it up. Lit something on fire. You can’t see it.” He shouldn’t be saying that. What’s he trying to do? “How about tomorrow? Ben’s not — going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Klaus,” says Ben, feeling almost guilty.

Vanya seems unsure.

But she says, “Okay.”

* * *

VII. Made From Hair and Twine.

It’s tomorrow now.

“Did it hurt?” says Vanya. “Do you remember any of it?”

Ben just knows he was awake, and then he wasn’t. There was no in-between time. “Not really. I don’t really know what happened, honestly.”

Klaus relays the message. He’s perched on the basement dinner table. “He says not really. He doesn’t really know what happened.

Vanya looks relieved. “What’s it like being — you know?”

What _is_ it like? “Exactly the same. All your siblings kind of ignore you. And I’m really hungry, actually.” He could go for some chicken nuggets. Or butter toast. Or a strudel, maybe.  

Klaus repeats this.

Their sister laughs a little. That’s good.

“And why won’t Klaus let me in his room?” she says. “He always goes into mine without asking. He’s always _taking my skirts_.” She emphasizes it.

Yeah, he does that.

“He’s a butt,” says Ben. He pretends that the discussion doesn’t need a medium. Klaus is good at quoting verbatim, though. “He’s a butt-asshole.”

He imagines some ephemeral mind space. It’s just him and his sister. And Klaus. Klaus, too.

Vanya laughs again. It’s like she’s not used to laughing anymore. “I — I found this book you might like the other day. I was going to throw it away, but. We can look at it later. You’ll really, really like it.”

He’s appalled. “You were going to _throw it away?_ ” A _book_ he’ll like, no less.  

“I don’t know,” she says. “I thought it would just. I was.”

Oh.

“Yeah.”

“We haven’t done anything to your room yet.”

Ben thought they would have shred it up. “Why not?”

“No one _wants_ to do anything to it. I don’t think we’re capable of that.”

“What about. What about Five’s room?” He knows already, though. “Same thing?” 

She nods. “Same thing.” It’s like she’s waiting. “Do you think that — what happened to you happened to Five?” 

“I don’t know what happened to Five.” He hasn’t seen him. “But wherever he is, I think he’s okay.”

He has a gut feeling.

“The others are trying to get him back. I’m trying other things, though.” He’s proud of her. “He’d always sneak out to that doughnut place.”

“The doughnut place, right!” says Ben, recalling. “I loved their croissants.” Especially the glazed ones. God.

Vanya is smiling. “Did I make you hungrier?”

“One hundred percent. I hate you.”

“Ha. Um, macaroni and cheese. Spaghetti. Strawberries. Blueberries. Pineapples.”

If he had a real stomach, it’d be grumbling. “You just skipped from one food group to another,” Ben points out. 

“Ice cream,” she continues. “Mochi. Popsicles.”

“Those are on — another plane or something.” Because dessert is different. “Are you working on any new music?”

“Still hacking at Bach,” she goes. “Is it scary?”

Ben isn’t sure what she means. “What’s scary?”

“I was going to say,” she says, “you know. But. Anything.”

It depends. “A little.” He doesn’t think he’s dealt with it in the best way. But none of them are good at that sort of thing.

* * *

VIII. Corrective Tape.

They find Dad in the downstairs hallway.

Wow. Okay. God.

His dad hasn’t changed a bit. Either that, or he’s changed entirely. Ben never knows what to make of him. Reginald Hargreeves is an enigma, and Ben guesses that he’s his son.

That’s fine. 

“Number Four,” says Dad. “It would be of best interest to discuss what you had done to your living quarters on Thursday morning.”

But they don’t.

Dad pauses, as if to begin, then he walks away.

Klaus’s bedroom has not been cleaned.

“I didn’t tell them anything,” he says.

“Are you going to?” Ben asks.

Klaus seems surprised at this. And like their dad, he leaves it all at that.

* * *

IX. Appendix.

Ben comes back. It looks like his siblings have returned from a mission. He can’t tell if there’s anyone outside, behind the barriers. Everyone’s sweaty, everyone’s bleeding, and Dad’s unscathed in his two-piece suit.

“Refer to Dr. Pogo for first aid,” says Dad. And he’s off, probably to his office.

Klaus is jumping up the stairs. Ben can’t go anywhere else.

“I want a _nap_ ,” he says. “No one can stop me.”

On that note. “I can,” says Ben. He’s recently attained that skill. “You should let Pogo look at your forehead.” He's got a bit of a cut. 

Klaus waves him off. “It’ll go away.”

“Nothing goes away.” It’s a new development. “ _I_ didn’t go away.”

“Well,” Klaus says. He opens his bedroom door.

Vanya’s in there.

She’s holding a belt, looped like a noose, and a book. The cover is colorful. On Klaus’s bed is the remnants of his light fixture. There are pillows and a blanket on the floor. Ben hasn’t been in his brother’s room since the day he found him.

So it seems that Klaus wasn’t kidding when he said he hadn’t told anyone.

“Klaus,” says Vanya. “I… I don’t. What’s.  _Klaus._ ”

She looks like she’s in pain.

“Why — why are you in my room?” says Klaus. Oh, God. They’re stupid. They’re stupid.

“I wanted to leave the book for Ben,” she says. “He wouldn’t be in _his_ room.” She looks at the floor. “Klaus…”

“I’ll never do anything again,” says Klaus. “I’m sorry.” 

“You don’t have to apologize,” says Vanya. Her jaw is set and her eyes are welling.

“Hey,” Ben says. He wants to take her hand, but he can’t.

Then Vanya stops.

“Ben’s not there, isn’t he,” she says. “He’s not there. You just — you didn’t want us to know. You didn’t want us to think that you —” she breaks.

“Vanya,” says Klaus. “That’s not — come on.”

“Wait,” Ben tells her, “I’m here. I’m never — I’m _here.”_

Oh, God. He doesn’t — 

“You just wanted to distract us,” Vanya says. “You wanted to distract… yourself. That’s — that’s okay. It’s just. I don’t know why I believed you.”

“I’m right here, Vanya,” says Ben. He doesn’t know what’s happening.

“He’s right _here,”_ says Klaus, like he’s begging.  

Vanya shakes her head. “Why would he come back? Why would he want to see me again?”

“You’re — you’re my sister,” says Ben. “I want — Vanya, please.” He wishes she could see him. That way, he’d know he’s real. She talked to him and she knew he was listening. That made him feel _physical_.  

Klaus is almost trembling. “I — I promise you. He’s with us. He can hear us.”

“You don’t have to,” says Vanya, wringing her hands. “We don’t have to talk about this anymore. It’s — okay.” 

“Ben wouldn’t leave us,” says Klaus, desperate, “Can’t you — he’s standing over there. He’s right —” 

Vanya covers her ears. “You _don’t_ have to. I just want to talk to _you_ now. Klaus, I want to talk to _you_. It’s going to be okay.”

“I want you to _listen_ ,” Ben says, voice raised, as if she’d catch it.  

Klaus approaches her. “Vanya, Ben wants to —” 

“ _You’re lying to me.”_ Vanya’s voice seems to snap in half. “Klaus, _you’re lying_. He’s not here. No one’s here. They _left_ me. They don’t _care_ anymore. They’re _gone_. You didn’t need to copy them!” Vanya. Vanya. Oh, God. “Why can’t you wait? _I’m_ going to wait. I don’t want to wait, but I’m going to. None of you will notice.”

“None of you notice _me,_ either,” says Klaus. “Ben’s —”

“Ben’s not here!” It’s like the ceiling is tearing apart. “He’s never coming back. Why would he want to?”

“Because —”

“ _Stop it_ ,” she says. “Stop it, stop it. He’s dead. He’s  _dead_ , _he’s_   _dead_ , and he’s not coming back. We need to wake up and realize it. We need to hold on through it.” Vanya breathes. “If _you_ want to die, tell me. That way I can stop you. That way… we can wait until we’re older to leave.” And she crumbles. “Tomorrow, I’m making Five more sandwiches.”

Klaus reaches, as if to embrace her.

Ben does the same.

But neither of them touch their sister.

* * *

X. Acknowledgements.

He has a lot of time to think about it. Ben is very young. Ben is ancient.

But the answer is clear.

* * *

Allison lands with the rest of siblings. It smells slightly of smoke.

There’s the sound of an uproar.

People are trying to enter the Academy.

They are dismantling the pillars.

They are tearing apart the walls.

Oh, no.

“ _Five,”_ she shouts. She is barely heard. “ _Five_. _Five_.” They were just in the kitchen. In the living room. 

“Where the _fuck,_ ” says Klaus, struggling to his feet. Allison pushes him up.

“We jumped,” Five says, screeching. The voices of strangers grow stronger. Five is wearing bandages, but he has no injuries. “I — I didn’t fucking mean to! Allison said she wanted to, and then — it just _happened_. From my last jump, maybe some fucking matter kept the fucking pathway open —”

“You don’t have to explain,” says Ben. He’s barricading the door with Luther.

So is Diego. “ _Just get us the fuck out of here,”_ he says.

Five tries.

“I _can’t,”_ he tells them. “I’m used up.”

The strangers scrabble and curse.

“The fucking door’s not holding,” says Diego. “Anyone know what’s going on?”

Vanya’s in the middle. She seems to realize it. “Alternate — this is one of those split realities. Just like the one Five went to.”

“Are those fucking civilians?” says Klaus. “They don’t look happy.”

“Shut up,” says Five. “I think —” a burst of blue, then nothing. “Shit.”

There is a barricade of chairs in front of the entrance. “ _Five_ ,” says Luther, “let’s get going with it.” 

Klaus throws a lamp out the window. 

The window cracks and corrodes.

It’s down.

“ _What the fuck did you just do?_ ” says Diego.

Klaus runs. “I thought it would fucking repel them.”

“Just stay back,” says Ben. “Everyone, stay back —”

The strangers break into their house.

It is a multitude.

One stranger carries Mom’s head on a pike.

Another carries Pogo’s.

There are seven more pikes. There are handmade signs, written in marker. There are buttons.

Oh, shit.

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” says Five.

“Get it faster,” Luther yells.

“I heard a rumor,” Allison starts, but she is smothered out by sound.

Luther sweeps his way through. Klaus finds another lamp. Ben unleashes his powers. Diego has his knives. It’s not enough.

Vanya is shellshocked.

Allison shoves towards her — but she is grabbed.

They are grabbed.

They’re going to be torn apart.

And Vanya snaps out of it. “ _No_ —”

The air is still.

Then dropped.

Then recovered.

Again starts the chaos. Oh, God. Oh, God.

“ _Okay_ ,” says Five.

And it disappears.

And they’re back where they began.

But maybe not exactly.

Allison does a headcount. One, two… six, seven. No stragglers. 

Five stands and sways. Then he passes out.

Klaus sprints for a trash bin and throws up on the way there.

Diego knocks over a vase trying to get up.

Luther speaks, but his words are jumbled and lost.

Vanya is a tremor. Her hands twitch.

Ben attempts damage control, but can’t seem to get all his muscles to work.

It’s jarring.

Allison doesn’t know what she was expecting.


	7. Season Two Milk Bone

All this fucking music. Oh. That’s the shit he _knows_. The stuff he danced to as a kid. The stuff he sang until his legs gave out — or Ben’s, or Allison’s — Diego and Vanya and Five and Luther never joined them because they were fucking prats. Somewhere, there is a choir of heavenly, badass angels. They’ve all got synth keyboards and bass guitars instead of organs. It perfectly matches the bouquets in the aisles. Klaus specifically asked for lilies. It’s a sympathy kind of thing. Every good parish hall has lilies. Every good parish hall hands out breakfast on Christmas and Easter morning. If they don’t — can they really be called a parish hall? 

Yeah. He’s in a church. He’s been in many churches — not for their intended purposes, of course, but he’s been in many nonetheless. But breaking this chain of holiness are dead bodies on the ground, piling. Different type of holy. He can put a name to most of the faces. He met her at a motel, just recently — him at a cemetery, when he was ten and cried like a little bitch every night — and her at a dollar store, five years back, near the freezer aisle. Oh. He’s so sorry that she had passed.

Even so, this is an excellent turn-out. He wonders if they recognize him still. There has only been one ghost that has ever addressed Klaus directly. 

There is a misty atmosphere, and he walks past all the pews.

Yeah. Yeah, Klaus’s funeral is the war to end all wars.

The show-stopping Number Four.

His casket is open and polished. The mourners are nonexistent, or they’ve all left him before the invitations got sent out.

There has only been two ghosts that have ever addressed Klaus directly. 

Half of them was the prettiest ghost Klaus ever met.

From Saigon, from California, but even then not really. A private with big brown eyes. He used to talk about the funeral shot. God. He used to talk about the black-and-white formal, and floral arrangements, and organ players, and scuffed parish floors, and suspended animation, and middle preparation, and start-end intervals. He’s say that he’d want his sisters to curse in their eulogies. He’d speculate that it wasn’t the end. He’d predict which one of his aunts would through herself onto the pyre.

And then Klaus would say that he’s from the future, and that he didn’t really know how that was going to work out. And Dave would laugh and drill questions. He liked the idea of a paradox. Klaus liked the idea of Dave, maybe. Definitely.

He’ll let himself remember that part of it. This is just a middle space. He’s used to those. 

Dave’s not here, either.

What a nerd.

Klaus looks at his own dead face. He looks up at the one that’s kind of living.

Oh, wow.

All that fucking _acne._  Godliest God, didn’t he moisturize? Didn’t he _sleep?_ He knows he didn’t — but _didn’t_ he? Mom would make him wash his face every night. Diego and Allison would help her remind him.

Here comes again the music.

No one? Really? No one at all? No one but the floor? 

Well. Klaus hasn’t done anything to deserve a reception. Everyone he knows has lead a halfway decent life. He spent most of his time on the ground.

God, he’s ancient — twenty-nine? thirty? Thirty-one? What did he do in those three fucking decades — fuck around? Did he have a good time, at least? Did he blow it out of his goddamn system? Did he trace it on a sheet of paper? Did he follow the instructions? 

Well. It is what it is.

_C’est la vie._

And now he’s here.

There’s a benefit to being alone, for sure.

Klaus gets to count his own sheep. They’re all piled up, neat and tidy and holy.

In this place, there’s color. 

* * *

Fuck. His fucking vomit got on his shirt.

Yeah. Yeah — when Klaus was ten, he got the fucking flu — the whole nine yards — one-hundred-two-degree fevers and a nose so runny it finished a goddamn marathon and an ache that jangled his fucking shins off — and he threw up then, too. He fucking threw up. Like, fifty fucking times. It was a party. He’s been to plenty of those. Almost all of them have some form of driving under the influence. 

It’s all on the fucking tile, Klaus guesses.

Dad, rest his soul or not, is going to fucking freak. Who’s going to clean this up? He’s never been good at that kind of shit. He fucking manages _,_ butthat’s a different set of skills.

Well.

Something puts its hand on his shoulder.

Shit. That’s not what he meant. The seven ghosts have now gone solid. His siblings have been fucking with the goddamn — Klaus doesn’t fucking know — fucking time and space. And now time and space are going to fuck them back. What’s he going to do? Are they going to possess him? Oh, God. That’s never happened before. That’s something that neither Klaus nor ghosts can have. God, he doesn’t actually _know_ that. 

“Klaus.” Oh. Oh, that doesn’t sound like a ghost. That sounds like solid words. “You’ve been getting into lots of trouble lately. You know what your father says.” Klaus turns around. It’s Mom. She looks at him half-chiding. “Are you all right, sweetheart?” _Is_ he all right? Is _he_ all right? Gastric acid? He’s all right. “Let’s get you a new shirt.”

She lifts him up at the armpits. Klaus feels kind of like a baby.

* * *

The others are waiting in line to get cleaned up. It’s Vanya’s turn — Klaus went first, and Allison just finished.

The last time Mom gave Vanya a bath, she was eight. (She won’t put into consideration the last time she took a bath in general.)

Since last week, she has chosen to prefer showers. 

“You’ve all gotten into a quite bit of trouble, haven’t you?” says Mom, with cadenced affection. She scrubs Vanya’s arms, and Vanya appreciates it. At least there’s something here that isn’t fake. 

“Yeah.” 

(When they jumped through reality, she made the world stop moving. She heard a ringing note, and she stopped gravity from falling. What else can she do? 

God, but is it wrong? Of course it’s wrong. There is something wrong with every good thing. _Is_ this a good thing? She hasn’t decided yet. She thought about it, but she can’t take an answer from her head.

She doesn’t know if that’s the way it is.)

Mom combs her hair. Vanya makes whirlpools in the bathwater and pretends she isn’t here. She pretends that this is an ocean, and she’s the foam. She pretends that she is melting away.

She thinks she did a lot of pretending, growing up. It's faded, but she knows that the real stuff was for the others. 

They’re older. Vanya’s older. Mom doesn’t know, but Vanya does.

(Still.)

* * *

He shakes out his wrists and points his fingers down towards the ground — Diego needs to get his goddamn blood flowing. Maybe it’s a Hargreeves thing. They always have to be moving. Doing something. And yet they’re the opposite of productive.

All right.

They all situate themselves in the living room. Mom’s sitting across from them, a clear-slate expression on her face.

“Mom,” says Diego. He steadies his voice. He’s used to interrogating, or reviewing witnesses — he was trained enough — and he can’t sound unsure. “What do you remember?”

“That’s too fucking vague,” goes Five. He has new bandages around his hands.

“Shut up,” says Diego. He got them in this shit-show. He doesn’t get to state an opinion. “Mom?”

Mom recalibrates. Dad never told them how he made her. Pogo was equally as quiet. “It’s January twelve, two-thousand-two. There has been a recent trend of mild showers in —”

Fucking hell.

“She’s confused,” Luther says, like Diego doesn’t fucking see it. Luther doesn’t get to talk either. It’s for different reasons.

Five rubs his nose. “She’s off the time by two months. She won’t give us anything accurate. This isn’t worth it.” Goddamn this bastard.

“Where’s Pogo?” asks Allison. “He’ll be of more help. Mom doesn’t know anything. They shut her off for so long.”

“I don’t think he’ll tell us much, either,” Ben says. “He wouldn’t want to. In the meantime, she’s good enough to —”

“Shut _up._ ” Fucking idiots. But — “Sorry, Ben.” Only him. Why does he have to make that face? “I’m sorry. I — I know what I’m doing. Just don’t fucking talk about her like she isn’t there.” Though doesn’t think she’d be able to tell the difference. Still. “Mom. Can — we need you to... Mom, think about it. What — what do you know about — anything. Not now. Just — what happened before?”

“Don’t forget, Diego,” says Mom, a mantra. “If you see the word in your head, it will be much easier for you to —”

“I _know._ I mean.”

“It’s okay,” says Vanya.

He remembers the plan.

Forget the fucking plan.

He keeps going. “Where’d Dad go?”

“On a trip,” Five tells him. “Didn’t I say that already?”

Diego waves the bastard away. “I didn’t fucking ask you.”

Five crosses his arms.

“He’s away for some business,” Mom tells them. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back in a week.”

A week. Good. That’s information. “What kind of business?” says Diego.

“Your father is occupied by many different things. He’s a vigorous investor.”

Five speaks up. “Well, what —”

Diego glares. Five gets the message.

“When did you wake up?”  Diego goes on.

“This afternoon.” That’s information. That’s a start. “I haven’t been so punctual.”

“Did Pogo help fix you?”

“My repairs are scheduled in the next six weeks.”

“Where is he?”

“Around the house, as always.”

“Does anything seem different to you? Anything at all.”

“So much changes every day.” 

“Do you know what happened to us?” asks Diego. Mom doesn’t respond. “What do you remember from the last time we saw each other? Do you know?” She’s mute. “Mom?”

“Why… I saw you yesterday. You were very tired from training. I made you all a very nice soup. Vanya helped me serve it, didn’t you, Vanya?” Mom tilts her head. “Is there something wrong? Did something happen?”

Mom’s memory must have been wiped. Pogo must have done it when he woke her up again. It explains Mom’s behavior, and besides it’s not like this hasn’t been done before. Dad must have had skeletons to tuck away. And once, Five found out how to clear Mom’s databank. He said it was easy. Diego didn’t talk to that son of a bitch for weeks.

There’s no way she’d forget something like — her children fucking _dying_. The kids she’s raised since nineteen-ninety-three. 

But she would. 

No, she wouldn’t.

She would.

It’s not the Mom he knows. But it’s Mom. And here’s the rest of them.

* * *

They’re in the backyard, or what counts for it. This goddamn oak tree never has leaves. Not even in the spring. 

“Do you hear that?” says Diego. At the entrance to the Academy. “Out there. Whole fucking town’s come over.” They used to go home to a multitude once a month. There was a kind of pattern to it. People held signs, and said their names, and cheered — but it's more of a solemn thing this time around. There are people in paper masks. There are people leaving flowers at the door.

Diego tries pointing. 

Klaus walks backwards and stands on his toes. “Why are they lighting candles?”

There are seven marble statues, stained by rain and sun. Same typeface for every inscription. The statues are fairly new, by the looks of it. Maybe they’re made cement. Resin. Diego knows there’s a difference — he’s intercepted plenty of robberies — Dad’s an artistic son of a bitch — but he isn’t sure how to tell it out. 

Allison’s looking up at them, almost dazed. Diego puts his hand on her shoulder and shakes her out of it. 

She shrugs. 

He won’t say he gets it. He won’t say he gets anything, but.

Yeah.

“We’ll never have their adventures,” Five says, walking back and forth. “We never really had any of our own.” What is he talking about? “Do you think we’re going to find answers? Asking Mom? Waiting on Dad? Waiting on the fucking vigil?” He takes a breath. “There’s something we don’t understand, and we can figure it out.” Diego doesn’t want to hear about time travel bullshit. “We don’t have to be stuck here anymore.”

So that’s what this is about.

Okay. There has to be a strategy. They can’t be fucking spontaneous. That’s what’ll end them. They’re not as strong as they think, and they know better. Should know better. They’re fucking — accountable now, and they’re going to regret this. 

That’s just another point on the list.

“But we are,” says Vanya. Quietly.

Luther keeps his eyes down.

The Academy stands before them.

“Come on,” says Five. He holds out his hand. A suggestion. A plea. “With or without you.” He doesn’t seem very convinced with himself. 

What can Diego say? They’ll fuck it up.

Anything. Everything. A Hargreeves specialty.

He wouldn’t trust these assholes with a dollar.

But it’s too late to turn back anyway.


	8. Would-be Ruler

For sure, one thing Five hasn’t been able to crack: the transitions. He’s traveling faster than the speed of light, yes, but the changes that occur to his body in a jump are incongruent to that. He doesn’t know what the fucking deal is. Sometimes there’s no change. Sometimes, his injuries carry over. Sometimes there’s the normal symptoms, and sometimes he’s off the hook.  

He remembers his second encounter with an alternate universe. 

Yeah, because — with such high speeds come changes in mass. There’s going to be some inconsistencies, depending on how far he wants to go. It’ll shift him around, and as expected, his body gets affected. His _mind_ gets affected. Non-starters. He thinks he is used to being muddled, but there’s too much in play to be sure.

They arrive in front of a building. No one’s too disoriented this time.

Why’d he fucking make this decision? Why’d he take them with him?

Because he never got to. Five missed out on having siblings. He missed out on adventures, and adolescent bullshit.  Even when he had the chance, he took everything alone. Is that what he wanted?

Well, it’s gone anyway. It’s not important anymore.

All right. Five eyes the perimeter. Six siblings. A saturated sky, cloudless. Bright-green grass — the fake, squared kind. A stone building with a balcony, and a white one, arched like a dome. They lie over the island of a cul-de-sac; parked around them are cars with silver hubcaps. There are people dressed in blue or dressed in suits. A few carry black leather briefcases, matching their shoes. The trees tell him that it’s springtime, and to the left, a businesswoman sneezes.

Wait.

Yeah.

Fuck.

“Get up,” he tells his siblings. He follows his own advice. “Get _up_. Do you hear me?” Vertigo. Postural hypotension. Five got up too quickly.

Ben squints at him. “What —” Five fucking pulls his arm. “Ow.” He drops back down. “Shit.”

Sorry.

Just — okay. Okay. He needs to figure it out. Five looks down at himself — he’s wearing a collared blazer and an Ascot tie — he matches the passers by. So do his siblings. That’s the change, then. That’s the Schrödinger’s cat: they’re Temps. But what drew him here? What were the fucking odds?

Well, lately, he’s been jumping without purpose. Maybe those aren’t questions anymore.

“Where are we?” asks Diego, sluggish.

How many universes are there?

What’s this one like?

What does the Commission know?

“It looks,” Luther observes, “like nineteen-fifty.”

Allison hoists herself up. “It looks like Pavilion Square.”

There’s a pointed cough.

Five looks up. The businesswoman. A dress like the cult of domesticity.

The Handler’s face has no scars.

“Oh!” she says. “What a surprise. Her hair’s longer. “It’s my favorite family.” A different  timbre affects her voice. “How was your last assignment?” She carries a black purse. “Nothing awry this time?”

In that case, they’re in the cycle. Five was an Modern/Contemporary specialist. More or less, he kept it clean. It’s what he had to do.

He needs to make it seem like they’re _meant_ to be here. Like this is where they’ve been the whole time. Specifics like these make the lie seem strong, and he just has to pick a story.

He _could_ leave. But he needs to gather his bearings. Data needs collecting, besides.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” says Klaus, gesturing towards Ben, “my brother is freaking famished.” Five should have left them at home.

The Handler grins, and snaps her fingers.

* * *

Luther’s going up a staircase.

He’s — going up a staircase.

This is not what he was doing before. And it isn’t what he thought he’d be doing. 

There are people passing, and Luther doesn’t know any of them. He’s almost adrift, but it’s as if nothing strange has happened.

The woman with a black purse leads him forward, looking at him over her shoulder.

“The purses are such a lucrative investment, are they not?” says the woman, drawling. “We’re testing them out, and there hasn’t been a hitch up to this point. Good thing. We’re dealing with such an important ordeal right now.” What important ordeal? Luther doesn’t get it. “Temps don’t have access to these. Though I must say, you might enjoy being two places at once.” No, he wouldn't. He can barely manage one. “Call it another temporal paradox. Electrons do it all the time.”

Luther needs to know what’s happening. 

* * *

And now, Allison feels like she was in a coma.

She hates it like hell.

They’re moving.

“How did you do that?” Five says harshly. Who’d he mean that for?

At least he’s _here._ Two out of seven.

The lady in front of them turns her head.  “Ask your brother later. It might be a little while until you see him, but you should ask.” She looks forward again. “My screen is split right now.”

“Shit,” says Klaus. “Wait. Hold on.” Three out of seven. “Hold on. Hold on. Wait. Wait, wait. This is — wait.”

And then Diego. “We have some questions for you,” he says.

Four out of seven. So that leaves — Ben. Vanya. Luther. They shouldn’t be apart. God, where did they go?

“Where’s,” goes Klaus. “I need a little bit of, uh. This isn’t what I think it is. This is — briefcase.”

Where were they taken?

“All in due time,” the lady tells them. “We didn’t think you’d be back so late.”

* * *

There are railings that line the walkways, and a fire alarm on this wall.

He should pull it.

Why the hell would he pull it?

Luther’s thinking the way Klaus would.

Beside him is Ben. _Ben._ Okay. A familiar face. Thank God for his brother. Thank everything else. Ben looks at him with a somewhat-panicked, somewhat-relieved expression and seems to feel the same way.

Then Luther turns to the left.

Vanya.

Damn it.

* * *

“Neither did we,” Five says. Klaus opens his mouth. Five covers it with his hand. Diego walks faster, and Five grabs his wrist. He glares a threat towards Allison.

Out of pure spite, Allison wants to throw a word in. “Why did you separate us?” she says.

Five frowns. Allison feels a childish sort of pride.

Five keeps tricking them. He always does. 

And now Vanya might be getting nervous. 

Luther’s not keen at facing new things, either.

Ben will go in loops trying to tame them both.

Allison is nowhere near them. 

“Divide and conquer, Number Three,” says the lady — the Handler. “While you’re here, we might as well kill two proverbial birds with one stone.”

* * *

He and Diego have talked about it, and Diego had been on the fence. Of course he would be. He’s Diego. But he had already agreed to it, and they both are nothing but men of their words.

There are two ways they can end their sister’s life.

The first way is direct. It’s what he and Diego are used to, anyway. They were on the offensive side of strategies, along with Ben. Allison and Klaus were on the reconnaissance, and Five alternated. Vanya is the odd number. Diego has his daggers, and Luther’s three times her size. Their sister has her powers, but she won’t know the defense. Her violin was her lightning rod, and she doesn’t have that with her. So they can keep it as quick and as painless as they can.

Vanya was never trained to protect herself. Luther would notice her reading the books and studying the pictures when she wasn’t supposed to. He doesn’t think she ever put it all into practice until the end.

* * *

She watches Five drop his hands to his sides.

Klaus shakes himself out. “I even _licked_ you.” 

“The fuck is your grip?” says Diego, shaking out his wrist. “What about Allison?”

“What about me?” Allison says.

“Why won’t you fucking —”

They remember that they have company.

They follow the Handler.

* * *

So the second way is deception. She almost killed them at the Icarus Theater. Brute force can be defeated. They can find a loophole. They can lie. She won’t expect it from them, and in the right frame, no one is implicated. That’s what Diego says. An accident is an accident. Those can’t be prevented or solved.

It could go in every direction, depending on where they end up. Luther’s been tossed around as of late. The only definite step in their plan is that they’ll have to get her alone.

There are seven Hargreeves siblings. If this situation is any indication, then he should know by now that no one’s ever going to be alone.

Do they want that for themselves? Does Luther want to be alone? It’s the path he’s been leading.

God, he’s just going through the motions. But the motions don’t exist.

* * *

No, no, _wait._ This is wrong. This is all horribly, scarily wrong. They don’t belong here! _Allison_ should be — anywhere else.

Diego starts talking. “Who —”

“No one,” says Five. “Don’t.”

Why did she go with him? What’s to find? There’s plenty of everything on the ground. Why go away?

Allison should be at a custody court case. Allison should be with her _daughter._

“Later?” says Klaus.

Diego brisks. “Not later.”

“Yes, later,” says Five. “Are you fucking stupid?

Oh, God. Claire. She forgot. She was swept up in the the future and the past and herself, and forgot _._

She is not a good mother. Was she ever?

“Have you ever heard of thinking it through?” goes Diego.

“Have you?” Five says.

It’s difficult. There’s nothing so _exciting_ about parenting. Yes, Allison loves her daughter. Default. She loves her so much that she can never be happy without her. But the daily routine gets mundane.

That’s gone now. She finds that she can’t stay grounded.

She wants to stay where she is right now.

The Handler isn’t looking at them. “You’re all so... charming, let’s say.”

Then a blink.

* * *

This is insane. This is _impossible._

Or — it’s not.

He remembers everything that has happened to this point.

When did he stop walking?

Shit. Luther was too lost in thought. There’s a person fitting him into a suit. Another adjusts his cufflinks, and another, without permission, takes off his shoes. All right, then. Ben glances up at him, as if for reassurance, and Luther nods as if he can give it.

Vanya looks at him, too. A porter fixes her sleeves.

“Dapper,” says the woman. She touches Vanya’s hair. Vanya shrinks back.

Luther needs to _speak_. He needs to find out more. They got pulled into something they haven’t heard of, and he’s got to be the one to pull them out. Where does he start?

This is why Luther never volunteered first in negotiations. That was for Allison or Diego. Luther is not a good initiator.

And God, this suit is tight. The last one he found himself in was bad enough. He loosens his tie. When did he get this tie? He hoped that the world-jumping, time-travel bullshit would get him sorted.

But Luther is still trapped, and he’s his own cage. It’s worthless. It’s what he felt all that time ago, after the brink of death, on a table in the basement of the Academy. It’s what he felt again, in that same room, with Allison barely breathing. Generally, it’s not something he wants to repeat. And here he is.

Where is he now?

* * *

The room is pitch — save for a single light. There’s a line of heads, each shaped like a cartoon animal. A tiger. A ram. A crow. A fox.

Allison is morbidly reminded of the cartoons Claire used to like when she was small.

“You’re overdue for new uniforms,” says the Handler. “The outfitters are busy, so these will come first.”

Five taps his knuckles on the tiger mask. He takes the fox. “What about new bodies?” Allison doesn’t know what that means.

Beside them, Klaus is mumbling to himself. Allison can’t pick anything up.

“What’s the use of… new bodies?” says Diego. He holds the tiger mask.

“I agree,” says the Handler. These fit you so well. And they’re much more spiritedly than the middle-aged editions.” She pivots on her heel. “Oh! Number Three. Allison. Excellent work on the J.F.K. operative. How do you do it so well?”

Allison has no clue. “I go through what I need.”

It wasn’t her best performance. The Handler doesn’t seem to buy it.

But she says, “Wise words,” and Allison can breathe.

The only mask left for Allison is the crow. So it’s hers, then.  

“Let’s talk about the multiverse,” Five says.

They’re transported.

* * *

He needs to _pay attention._

Isn’t that a lesson their father taught him? Head on shoulders. Eyes open wide. Stay astute, or suffer the consequences. Was that all there was to it?

“These purses are such a versatile tool,” says the woman. What is this place? A bunker? It’s different than the staircase. It’s darker. “Now, we got a new shipment in of your kits.” She displays an entire armory. “Voila. All yours.” The woman smiles crookedly. “Your task is of utmost importance. I’ll let you in on that, at least. And there are no other employees here we can entrust with this. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't give you this mission. But we are.”

She hands Vanya a briefcase. It’s heavy enough that Vanya lurches with it, and Ben hurries to help her.

Luther folds his hands.

Then the three of them are somewhere else.

* * *

It seems to be that they’re in a fitting room. Allison has been in plenty of these.

“I’m chill,” says Klaus. “I’m chill now.”

“A multiverse?” says the Handler. She points to the workers. “Oh, don’t mind them. They’re checking your sizes.” Reset. “A multiverse. Five, we’ve discussed this before. Such a thing can’t exist against the Commission. We clear out all the little hitches.”

“That’s,” says Diego, “that’s what we’re dealing with. Multiverses.”

Well. Allison doesn’t know the technicalities. But she’s acted in plenty of B-movie sci-fi thrillers to get the gist.

Five raises his arms. Someone is wrapping a tape measure around his waist. “So if it were to exist.” Their animal masks are stacked in a corner.

“Would it be something you know about?” Allison interrupts. The Handler stands up straighter.

Five looks at Allison, annoyed. “It would be _beyond_ the Commission.”

“Nothing exists beyond the Commission,” says the Handler.

Not even Claire. Claire, who, in every instance, will not come to being.

Is Allison getting what she wanted? She aches, but a weight she never knew existed has been lifted.

It’s much sweeter not knowing.

* * *

Luther might trip over. Ben grabs his arm and Vanya collides with his shoulder. Is this a typical type of debriefing, wherever they’ve ended up? The woman said she was testing a purse. Luther won’t pretend that he understands.

Laid out in front of them are three masks. One dove, one lion, and one elephant.

He supposes the woman expects him to take one.

And dazedly, he does. The lion does it.

“That’s about it,” says the woman.

“What now?” asks Luther.

She waves her fingers. “Safe travels.”

* * *

They’re in an arsenal. There might have been a time, once, when Allison could have named all the guns on this wall. They were tested on weapon types and ranges when they were six-years-old.

Klaus sways. Diego stumbles. Allison tries to stand her ground.

“Your siblings aren’t very chatty today,” says the Handler. “Not a problem. I’ve had quite the discussion with you four.”

“What’s the task this time?” asks Five.

“You’ll see the card. Nineteen-eighty-nine. Now, come on. Choose.” They take their pick of pistols. “Have a nice flight, as they say.”

Gone again.

* * *

This is what Five said he did for a living. He killed people to fix the world. And it so it seems that Luther does, too.

And he’s going to.

They’ve arrived at a suburban neighborhood. The houses on this street are all the same colors.

In front of him is Vanya, back turned, dragging a briefcase behind her.

What difference does it make?

Luther took a gun from that armory.

“Is everyone together?” says Ben, stumbling up towards them. “Klaus was right. I’m goddamn hungry.” Vanya faces him. Luther sighs. “Five needed us to go with him. And he’s not even here.”

“Five told me,” says Vanya. “A long time ago.” A week is forever, then. “He told me everything he did, and I didn’t believe a word he said.”

Luther rubs his wrist over his nose. “He told me, too.” In an ice cream truck, with a mannequin. Luther supposes that his life has always been this strange.

“Well?” says Ben. “What now?” A mailbox opens. Luther steps forward, but Ben is first to check it. “I guess we’re in... Europe? Germany, maybe?” He takes out a steel tube. In it is a note. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

It’s a name.

There’s an address, too.

* * *

They’re in a city with flashing lights. In this back-lane is a vending machine, a fire escape, and a cardboard box — nothing is labeled in a script that Allison can understand.

Five gives them the whole story — or at least the shortened version of it.

Allison knows that about her family.  If something is comprehensible, then it must have been shortened.

Just like Vanya’s book.

She left parts out.

Frankly, so would Allison. 

She finds that she can’t blame her sister anymore.

Allison and Diego sit in shock.

Klaus examines the cardboard box.

Five takes a place by the vending machine. 

Diego reacts first, “You’re a killer.”

“Haven’t you been beating up criminals?” Five says. “We’re all killers. We’ve been killers since fucking Kindergarten.”

Not all of them. “Not Vanya,” Allison says. Well. “Not really.”

Klaus taps his foot. “So are we going to do that?”

“What?” says Five.

“Are we going to go around — ducking people out?” The cardboard box has been torn. 

Five takes a moment. “You are not going to duck people out. You’re just going to wait for the card.” He tucks his leg into his chest. “It’ll come out of the vending machine, I bet.”

“So what’s the point of not —” Diego says.

“How else are we going to get back the rest of our dumbass family? The Commission fucked us over.”

“Commission,” says Diego. They grapple with the quiet. “We can’t leave them alone, guys.”

It’s as if they’re young, and the mission had gone south enough to break. It’s as if Allison kept the power in her voice, and she was angry over something small and petty.

“I found something,” says Klaus. He shakes a metal capsule. “It was in the box.”

So Five was wrong. “Who is it?” he asks.

Klaus opens the capsule. “A delivery man. Yeah, here.” He throws a piece of paper towards them. “Let’s get something to eat.”


	9. Early 2000’s Karaoke-Party Hits

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have returned! 
> 
> Remixed the story a bit. Check out all those differences whoa
> 
> Thanks for boarding this train
> 
> Have a great one <3
> 
> (This note will self-destruct on the next update!)

My name is Vanya Hargreeves, and this is my story.

* * *

_Read an Exclusive Extract from Vanya Hargreeves’s Alluring Memoir — Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven._

In selected excerpts from her book, Number Seven from the famous Umbrella Academy reminisces upon her relationship with her brothers.

* * *

 Meals became the one time of day we _had_ to be together — and I met them with equal parts anticipation and dread. Would today be the day I engaged Allison? Would I finally stand up to Diego's taunts? Maybe I'd show Five the new piece I'd been working on for weeks.

Though more prone to arrogance and outbursts than the average preteen, Five was my sole companion in the years before he disappeared.

(He left after Ben died in the Incident, during a lunchtime in the summer. I knew Five’s real name — the name that our mother had assigned to him. It’s the one thing that I’ll never say. So far, no one has ever asked.)

It was after his departure, I suppose, that I became truly alone.

He told me everything — his frustrations with our family. His successes during the last mission. His new additions to a quickly-wrought experiment. His observations of the latest enemy line. We had a procedure to our conversations. After breakfast, we would meet. Five would talk for a while, then I would talk for a while. Both ways would go uninterrupted.

“Vanya,” he’d say. “I found something new. Vanya, you wouldn’t believe this. Vanya, everyone’s stupid. Vanya, there’s even more to situation. Vanya, it’s never a lie if you make it true. Vanya — you go now.”

“That’s it for me, Five.” Often, I would have nothing left to say.

And he’d go overtime.

I didn’t mind when I was younger.

Five didn’t think anyone else was too worthy of his attention (he liked to think was fifteen light-years ahead of everyone), but he seemed to think that I was.

With our siblings, there was always something for him to be jealous about. Allison could defeat him with ten words. In battle, Ben developed a quick and unflinching countenance. Luther played the role of leader. Diego never missed his mark. Klaus had untapped potential.

I was isolated by nature and nurture. Five was isolated by choice.

That’s the only reason he might have ever been jealous of me.

Otherwise, I was not a concern. How could I ever pose a threat? 

I often forget this. Just as the rest of my siblings were, Five was afraid of being inferior — of failing to reach the gold standard. Dad always pushed Five over his limit. (Of course, our father never tolerated disappointment. But he never truly expected it from anyone but me.)

It might have been because of this that Five wanted to be the best of the best. Five was trapped by self-improvement — and he was motivated. He became obsessed with honing his skills and gaining knowledge. It wasn’t for the love of learning — he simply wanted to be better. _Needed_ to be better. Five found solace in being the precocious one. He constantly corrected our siblings, much to their chagrin. He’d spend hours locked in his room with nothing but a piece of chalk, and he’d shout at anyone who interrupted.

He never shouted at me. He never belittled me like he did the others.

Because I wasn’t his equal — in his perspective, I was far below equal —

Or did he care about me?

I’d like to hope I know better now. But when you’re twelve-years-old and you believe that no one loves you, even the smallest of gestures is everything.  

“Vanya,” Five said once, “time travel will change everything. I’m going to change everything.” Neither of us really understood it. But it was his turn to speak, so I didn’t comment. “All parts of life come into place. Are we really _acting_ , or is it already there? I read that someplace. Nietzsche. One of the philosophers. I know what I’m saying.” He answered himself. “It’s already there. We just have to reach it.”

And he wanted a response that time.

“You’re joking,” I said. “Are you going to try?” I didn’t believe that he would. We were so small. “Don’t be weird.”

What had our father said about acorns?

Five went on, for a long time, about philosophy and dimensions and jumps. He talked about the implications. He talked about what came before.

Then he looked at me and scoffed. “You don’t catch any of it.”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

I remember feeling unaccustomed to the two-way discussion.

“Would you go with me?” he asked. “Because I’d bring you, maybe.”

And I had waited too long to reply, so I said nothing.

“You _want_ to be somewhere else,” my brother said. “Don’t you?” At the time, I wondered if that applied to him. “You can’t do anything, and you’re not doing anything. Why do you think Ben…” He trailed off. “Especially you. There’s nothing for you here.” He turned away. “For either of us, really.”

He wanted a reaction.

I went with, “That’s not true.”

Because we had each other.

He said, “It’s obvious. You can’t see it.” What if I did?

(Two weeks later, he didn’t come back home. I don’t believe that he time traveled. He simply fled and didn’t look back.

This wasn’t his first time storming off. This wasn’t anyone’s first time running away. Every time before, there would be a reunion.

It was probably because of lunch.

If I could reset everything, I’m not sure if I would follow him.)

Children are naive. They aren’t meant to be weapons. They aren’t meant to compete. They are far too pliable.

In some ways, I understood him. I loved Five, and Five loved me. I hated Five, and Five hated me. At least it felt that way. Maybe that’s why he kept me around. 

(Believe me, we were nothing like Luther and Allison. We were much too close to each other to reach that point. And Five was too smart for that besides.)

But still, I would do anything to see him again. To ask him what he meant by all of this. But despite everything we had seen and known, I don’t think he feels the same.

* * *

Vanya Hargreeves, better known as Number Seven, was born on October 1, 1989, along with forty-three other spontaneously-born children. As an infant, she was adopted by eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreeves into the world-renowned Umbrella Academy. She ran away from home at age seventeen, and after transferring from orchestra to orchestra, found tenure at the Icarus Theater Symphony. She teaches the violin and other stringed instruments. _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_ is her first book. Her press tour begins next month.

* * *

It looks like they’re in Busan. Five told them so, straight-up. There is a restaurant around the corner from their rendezvous alley, and it’s empty. The menu has pictures on it. The little telegram slip from the cardboard box has a picture on it, too.

Klaus decides that bibimbap is the greatest thing in the world.

That, and banh mi. He’s had a lot of banh mi recently. Just in the last ten months. Mom has always made the best tomato soup. Klaus also appreciates long walks on the beach — he’s only been to the beach twice, and even then the shells there weren’t the nice, collectible ones — nope, yeah, never mind, that is no longer a point of consideration — free showers from homeless shelters and charity agencies — he used to keep a list of all the open doors he could find — and a good theme song for classic cartoons. In this list, good theme songs are interchangeable with sexual encounters.

He didn’t know that briefcase-method time travel was corporate-sponsored. He thought that Five would take them to fourteen-ninety-two, not an art-deco company retreat.

A part of him was hoping that they’d miss another jump. But that’s just wishful thinking. He needs _something_ to hang onto. The journey is so turbulent.

Maybe he should listen to what Five’s saying right now.

It’s what Diego and Allison are doing, anyway.

“In 1936, I killed a little girl,” says Five, wiping his mouth with a white cloth napkin. “She was four.” Oh. “When I found her, she was making a whistle. You know those blades of grass? Yeah. When she saw me, she waved.” Five waves. “I shot her in the neck, but it wasn’t enough to take. She just wouldn’t die. I had to finish it off.” He takes some gamja jorim from a platter. “Another time — my mark was a sixteen-year-old maid. I had to make sure Catharine Greene would fund the cotton gin. Sixteen-year-old. The records say that the horse had stomped her through.” Five drinks from every cup but his own. “I got to travel. Went to Kalmar once. I was assigned a toddler, his mother, and his aunt. They drowned. Sweden needed to keep a non-alignment policy. Afterwards, I got the bigger stuff.” He keeps eating. Allison and Diego, notably, have stopped. “Not much different than what you all might be used to.” 

From behind Five’s chair emerges a kid with long hair, most of her just connective tissue — a teenager, her head like a car stuck in the wall — a family, gaunt and grey. Then in a gust — a whoosh — the empty restaurant is not so empty anymore. Beings more cadaver than human fill the seats and stand on the carpet. Dozens of them materialize. More than dozens. The empty restaurant is fucking crowded. Some of them stream outside and into the roads.

Five is downplaying it.

For who? For whom? For them?

“Fuck,” Diego mutters.

Allison chews on her lip. “So that’s in,” she says, holding her forehead, “our timeline. Our original universe. When you ran away.”

Five nods. “The timeline we come from. In this timeline, we might have…”

Klaus has grown rather used to seeing ghosts like these. He’s not about to lie — they’re not as bad as seeing his siblings. With luck, _those_ ghosts have long passed away.

Why is he so held up about that? It’s because they wouldn’t shut up. At least the other ones don’t talk to him unless he says hello. He’s the CEO.

One of the victim-ghosts isn’t injured at all. He wears a navy-colored uniform and a baseball cap. He seems young — he’s got the lank and tilt to prove it. He carries a tiny box and a plastic bag. He shouts something to the people in the unseen back-rooms and weaves straight through the other ghosts like he doesn’t notice them. He looks somewhat familiar.

Klaus looks at the telegram slip. Oh, okay. He looks at his tiny brother again. At his tiny siblings.

They’re walking out the door.

They haven’t even paid for their fucking meal. 

Klaus takes off his shoe and empties it. He usually keeps something in here — okay, a twenty. A few more bills in different tones and languages. This alternate-Klaus is fucking loaded. Hopefully the currency-exchange is suitable.

He bounds after the others. They’re already turning a corner. The ghosts are idling — and stepping away. 

Klaus catches up. 

“That’s him,” Five is saying. “That’s the delivery man.”

“We’re going to kill him,” says Klaus. Isn’t that how it will go?

“You’re _not_ going to kill him. You’re just going to see where he ends up.”

“And then?” says Diego.

The delivery man looks left and right. Klaus looks left in right. The delivery man seems frustrated, sighs harshly, and gets brisking.

He boards an approaching bus. They do the same. God, Klaus better have enough in his other shoe to pay the fare.

“They gave us masks,” says Allison. “We left them in the restaurant. Are we really —”

Five holds onto the handrail. “Shut up. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Let it play out.”

Diego grabs his arm. “What’s going on in you head? What are you going to do?”

“We left those weapons in the restaurant, too,” says Allison.

“No, you didn’t.” Five looks out the window. “Where’s the delivery guy heading?”

Goddamn. Five’s going to off someone.

But he said that they wouldn’t.

Well. Klaus kind of knows what it’s like to do what needs to be done.

Then there’s a shriek.

Someone has seen a ghost. Someone has become a ghost. Someone’s been disemboweled. The bus has exploded. The bus has become black-and-white. The bus has become prime tie-dye. Someone has a bomb. Someone does not have a bomb.

Someone is giving fucking birth.

There’s a roar in the bus. A woman shouts. The passengers in their seats become a standing crowd.

Oh. Wait.

* * *

“Do you hear that?” Ben asks his siblings. The sound is high-pitched and screeching — a plate dropped on the floor. They’ve reached the address on the mailbox telegram, but no further instructions arrive. He almost wishes that Five was here. But Five hasn’t seemed to be in such a good mood lately. Granted, the restlessness this might apply to their whole lot. 

“Guys,” Vanya whispers. And she points —

The sound is a baby crying.

Shit.

Uh. They’ll.

Luther bounds towards it first. They do the same.

It’s trembling. Its umbilical cord has been sloppily cut. There’s a drag of bright, fresh blood on the pavement, and another, leading in a narrow and wavering path. Then it falters. Farther down, it disappears, as if its source had disintegrated, or been whisked away, or both all at once.

How —

Is this what he thinks it is?

“No,” says Ben. “Do you…”

Who would leave — 

“There’s forty-three of us.” Vanya combs back her bangs with her hand. “Not us. Them. The — there’s forty-three kids. It’s a seven in forty-three chance.”

“Why would they — why would that woman send us here?” Ben doesn’t see any other possibilities. Unless this is just some random fucking kid. “She said it was important.”

Vanya’s in disbelief. “Who is it, then?”

“It’s a dude.” From what it looks like. And all of a sudden Ben feels ashamed. “It could be —” is it Five? Klaus, or Luther, or Diego? “It can’t be me.” He’s narrowing it down.

Luther takes off his coat.

He picks up the kid and makes a swaddle.

“Wait for its mother.” Vanya’s looking at Luther all strangely. “Wait for anyone else. This was the address, right?” It was. “We should wait. Until then, I think he’ll be okay.”

* * *

No one comes to stay. People have approached them, but the three of them can’t explain their situation very well. Ben should have paid attention during those language classes Dad made them take. He doesn’t think that any of his siblings remember much past _hello_ and _thank you_ in any dialect. 

They’ve taken turns holding the kid. It’s Ben’s third shirt. 

The baby stopped crying a while ago. Is it alive?

Why wouldn’t it be alive?

There are many reasons why it wouldn’t be alive.

Oh, God. What if it’s hungry? Babies are always hungry. That’s how they work. Right? They come fresh out of the womb without a cushion and without a meal. They’re fed for months on end without discomfort, and then they’re pushed out into the world with nothing. But there’s nothing to give. And if there was, Ben doesn’t have a clue. 

What if it dies? What will they do? 

It hasn’t seen anything yet. But Ben reminds himself that there’s nothing to see. It’s all empty space. 

There are forty-three children. Where are the others? Do they know? Dad had told them once that not all of them survived. Ben wonders if they have powers. If he met even one of them, would he know? They are so many people. 

What if there was more than seven? Ben figures it would just be more people to miss.

God. All right.

“The sun is setting,” Ben says. He wonders if Luther is cold without his coat. And he must be. Luther never liked winter much, but much can change in two decades.

Vanya looks reluctant. Then she takes the briefcase and opens it.


End file.
